In this episode we talk about, amongst other things:
Warning! Iffy acoustics and we are well out of practice at this podcast thing.
Warning! Contains ums, aws, and wobbly arguments.
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]]>Inevitably this leads to some thoughts on how existing models for innovation and experimentation in publishing are…
… flawed.
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]]>Maybe. Probably. High street retail has certainly been stomped on, heavily. Book stores were disrupted by eCommerce websites (read: Amazon). TV has been hit by streaming. As has music. Disruptive innovations are indeed disruptive and innovative. All that and more is happening on the business side of media.
But the mess happening on the creative and production side of media is something else entirely. The conflict, the fear-mongering, the vehemence, the total incomprehension of the other perspective—all of these are hallmarks of a paradigm shift, not a disruptive innovation.
Digger operators didn’t accuse hydraulics of causing the downfall of civilisation. Programmers didn’t claim that older, larger, smaller capacity hard disk drives were somehow more “real” than the newer, smaller, larger capacity ones. Builders didn’t stare in incomprehension at steel produced by steel mini mills. A hole in the ground is a hole in the ground. Storage space is storage space. Steel is steel. A disruptive innovation is a business proposition leading to a business transition. It rarely results in fundamental shifts in worldview. When that happens, when a new worldview appears in a field, that is a paradigm shift and it always leads to tension and conflict. Paradigm shifts extend beyond the merely financial and business-oriented. It is a seismic cultural transformation. Disruptive innovations, due to their economic dynamics, tend to completely take over their fields. Paradigm shifts always leave somebody behind. Sometimes it’s a lot of “somebodys”. A paradigm shift creates a schism in a field, causing conflict, misery, and heartache. When a disruptive innovation hits, both the old and the new are built on value networks that the other side can understand, at least intellectually, even when they disagree. The value networks force them to act in a certain way but do not prevent understanding. The two sides of a paradigm shift have no conceptual common ground because the shift represents a transformation of the field’s conceptual framework. Because the shift changes all models, theories, and practices, the two sides have very little in terms of common reference points to agree on. To a person on one side of the shift, the proclamations of the other will at best sound misguided and at worst sound utterly insane. What is basic common sense to one sounds like random noise to another.
The gap created by a disruptive innovation is eventually bridged. Low cost innovations iterate upwards to address the use cases of its predecessor, often doing exactly the same thing, just using a slightly different cost framework. The predecessor, the disrupted, often finds itself in a smaller but higher margin market that the disruptor cannot copy. The roles they play are economic.
A paradigm shift is less forgiving. The transition takes decades as people only give up their worldview in death. Fields change at a slower pace—as incumbents grow old, retire, and die. The losing paradigm becomes a parody of itself and whatever value it has to offer is captured by the new. The winning paradigm doesn’t recognise the validity or perspective of the conquered. It was a heresy, delusion, madness of the crowd, a superstition of an older era—even when it has stolen ideas, concepts, and methods wholesale from that ‘superstition’.
Which shows us the core difference between disruptive innovations and paradigm shifts. Disruptions are business conflicts where the human cost, if there is any, is in livelihoods and careers. Paradigm shifts are cultural conflicts that result in the loss of identities, beliefs, and values. I wish that what modern art and media is facing in a networked society were merely a disruptive innovation. But it isn’t. What we have instead is a conflict that cannot be won.
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]]>Computers and the internet virtualise both our tools and our location. And in doing so they make our various contexts virtual and shift the burden of keeping them separate onto us, the user. The makers of computers, phones, and similar devices have collapsed our various contexts together without paying any attention to what that does to us. It is up to us to figure out how to maintain and separate the various contexts we need for optimum productivity, creativity, satisfaction, and joy.
There is another name for this context collapse that you might be more familiar with: distraction. Minimalism and distraction-free environments don’t address the fundamental problem because they think the problem is our inability to handle information (we can handle it fine, thank you). The problem isn’t complexity but information from another context intruding into your current one.
Each type of work or play you do deserves its own context. It isn’t a question of simplifying or disconnecting—although that can work—but of making sure that the signals you are getting and the complexity of the environment is appropriate to the task.
Here are some common ways of creating your own work contexts:
The simplest way is to do what the writer Tobias Buckell does: create a separate user on your computer for your work. That way you can customise what apps are installed and wall off parts of the network without disconnecting completely.
Just disconnecting and turning off the wifi on your computer isn’t enough to create a new context. It needs to be distinctive enough for your subconscious to never be in doubt as to what context you are in. That’s why you shouldn’t eat at your desk and that’s why, instead of just turning off your wifi you should instead go and work in a local cafe or in that one room in your house that has no wifi reception.
Another option is to do parts of your work with analogue tools. It’s an easy way to create a completely new mental context for what you’re doing. Writing, storyboarding, sketching, and outlining are all tasks that can at least partly be done using analogue tools.
Separate contexts into devices. Keep work on the laptop and social media on the phone. For a while I had a rule where I’d write the first draft of everything I wrote on my first-generation iPad using a bluetooth keyboard. Tablets are getting cheap enough to be bought and used as single purpose devices (games, browsing, reading) relieving your other devices of the burden of maintaining multiple contexts. Migrate the personal away from the laptop and gradually turn it into a pure work context.
The key to tackling ‘distraction’ isn’t minimalism or decluttering (although that can work as well) but keeping your various contexts separate. You can do that without replacing all of your apps or buying a separate laptop for work.
It does take a bit of organisation, but then so does almost anything interesting.
]]>I am not talking about Transmedia. I am talking about Fan Fiction.
The multi-platform storytelling that we call Transmedia is an attempt to replicate the creativity and involvement of fandom communities. A corporation doing this artificially is akin to trying to culture bacteria by replacing the growth medium with antibiotics. Multi-platform fan-created media can’t be replicated on its own, without the fandom, because it isn’t a “thing” but a symptom. Fan fiction is the spontaneous expression of a creative and collaborative community with a shared interest. It isn’t a media artifact but one characteristic of many of a vibrant community.
The community is the thing, not the media.
To truly replicate fan-created media you first need to make something that interests a lot of people. Then you need to nurture the community around it, make sure it has spaces that are safe from you and your involvement and then you hope for the best.
If you have enough fans and they feel safe enough to do so and if they care enough about your work, then they will create. The diversity of the stories and the media they will tell will be directly proportional to your fandom.
Trying to build that phenomenon artificially from the top down will always fail.
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