This Week’s Insights: Could Fortnite be the next social network?… How artificial intelligence is finding new audiences… The limits of social media influencers… Is the Oscars movie academy compromising itself chasing audience?… How neuroscience is helping us understand audiences.
- The Game That’s Become A Platform That’s Become The Big New Social Network: The viral video game Fortnite now has 200 million users, and it’s transcended mere gamedom. For millions of players, Fortnite has become a daily social square – a digital mall or virtual afterschool meetup that spans neighborhoods, cities, countries and continents. This role is powered by Fortnite’s free availability, robust voice chat, cross-platform functionality, and collaborative gameplay. Accordingly, examples abound of kids, adults and families simply hanging out or catching up on Fortnite while they play. In short, it’s become a mega social network built around community activity. Is this the next version of of social networks?
- How Are Your Going To Compete With Artificial Intelligence For Audience? The biggest companies in the world are integrating AI into their business, using it to make smarter decisions and give them an edge. AI can crunch massive amounts of data and find insights that would escape the notice of humans. So how might AI integrate into the arts? Last week the Metropolitan Museum, MIT and Microsoft presented five digital prototypes that harness artificial intelligence to make use of images of objects in the Met’s collection. … Visitors could sample applications like Storyteller, which uses voice recognition AI to conjure Met images illustrating whatever words a user utters aloud … [or] My Life, My Met, which uses AI to analyze a user’s Instagram’s posts and replaces the images with the closest matches to works in the Met’s collection.”
- Viral Influencers Are Great At Organizing Communities (But There Are Limitations): Sociologists Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport have studied the ways that protest tactics and schemes have spread out of political culture and into other spaces, especially entertainment. They coined the phrase “ubiquitous movement practices” to describe how petitions, boycotts, and the like—once tactics used solely for political goals—are now deployed across all kinds of social and cultural concerns from trying to ensure Family Guy remains on the air to trying to get the Postal Service “to issue a Marx Brothers stamp.”
- The Academy Awards – Compromising Your Soul For Audience? First was the trial balloon of creating a new “popular” movie category. Then, after controversies about hosting, a decision not to have a host. And last week, a decision to present cinematography awards during commercials in the telecast. Just how far do you go to try to stay relevant to audiences? Chicago Tribune critic Michael Philips: “If ABC and the Oscars keep this up, by 2028 we may be watching a 90-minute infomercial with no host, no technical or design awards, no sense of craft or history, and a whole helluva lot of ‘Avengers’ cast members, whoever they are by then.” By week’s end, after howls of protest, the Academy had reversed itself on broadcasting the cinematography awards.
- How Will You Find Your Next Audience? Try Neuroscience: Neuroscience, it turns out, can help change how companies think about new opportunities, and specifically, within the emerging field of applied neuroscience. Applied neuroscience is best described as the use of neuroscience tools and insights to measure and understand human behavior. Using applied neuroscience, leaders are able to generate data about critical moments of decision making, and then use this data to make confident choices that help to navigate the future of an initiative.
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