Last week, Ian M. Rountree and I started Read It All Week, a challenge to read everything we were subscribed to — especially all the blogs we so easily subscribe to, but never actually absorb.  We did this for two reasons:

• To reconsider why we subscribe to certain kinds of media, and
• To learn how long it would take to actually read everything we’re committed to.

What I Started With

My goal was to read every post published to the 63 blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader.

I wasn’t sure how long it would take, but my guess was around 15 hours.

So, What Happened… and How Long DID It Take?

Here’s how it worked out for me:

• Total # of items read (or, when uninteresting, skimmed) in Google Reader: 560
• Total # of those 560 items that had been shared by others: 235
• Total # of those 560 items I then felt compelled to share: 32
• Total time invested reading items in Google Reader: 496 minutes (or 8+ hours)

In other words, I spent more than one entire workday reading.

About 2/5 of that reading load were items suggested to me by others.

And yet, in that time, I only felt compelled to share 1/18th of what I found.

Sounds like my incoming signal-to-noise ratio is a bit excessive…

What Else Did I Learn?

Well, in no particular order, I came to the following conclusions:

1. I read more deeply when I break my reading time up into smaller sessions.

On days when I made time to check Reader two or three times, I felt more able to really read each post.

On days when I only checked Reader once, I felt more compelled to just get through it.  This led to much more skimming and much less sharing, since I’d invested less time emotionally in what I was reading.

On the days when I felt pressed for time, I also found myself resenting longer posts and highly prolific publishers, which seemed like obstacles between me and “done,” rather than the valuable sources of information I recognized them as during my more leisurely reads.

2.  Most of the information people share is useless to me.

But it’s not the information you (or I) might suspect.

Initially, I presumed that the social media-specific posts shared by the people I follow on Reader would be enriching.  Since I was subscribed to only a dozen social media blogs, I knew I had to be missing something interesting.

Not really.

It turns out most people in the social media field read the same major news sources and share the same information, or variations thereof.  Plus, anything relevant or popular from these channels is usually retweeted endlessly throughout the week.  (For example, I learned about Flipboard from a shared item in Reader, but I would have also learned about it from any of the 2 dozen tweets I noticed about that same article.)

The other thing I realized?  Most social media-related articles are crap.  Some are rehashes of things I already know (which, obviously, is not what you already know, and I get that).  Others are so niche-specific that I’d never make use of the information.  And still others are such common sense sub-101 blather that reading them wastes my time.

So… what information did matter to me?

3.  I need to subscribe to more interesting blogs.

Again, “interesting” in this sense means “interesting to me.”

In my case, I’m drawn to posts about art, literature, culture, science and history.  These are the areas I want to learn more about, as opposed to social media, a field in which I regularly feel overwhelmed by sameness.

Which means I need to adjust my subscriptions.

4.  Consistency is key.

Writing one good blog post is easy; writing good blog posts regularly is rare.

Often, I’ll read one or two good posts by an author and then subscribe to his / her blog.  And then, over the ensuing weeks, I’ll realize one or two good posts may be all they have to offer.

If so, I can’t wait around forever for their next great idea.  My time is precious, and I’d rather not step through a minefield of oysters in order to find your few buried pearls.

(This also explains why some of the blogs I consider most indispensable — like The Rumpus — are group blogs curated magazine-style from the contributions of many.)

Although writing good blog posts is hard, finding good blog posts to share shouldn’t be.

And yet…

5.  I’m confused by people’s motivations when sharing items.

I follow some potentially interesting people on Reader, because I presume they’ll find (and share) articles I won’t.  But again, the social media field is crushed by redundancy.  For example, I follow Chris Brogan, Chris Penn, C.C. Chapman and Steve Garfield (among others) which means I often see the same information shared several times.

In addition, some people seem to share everything they read, which makes me wonder if they’re confusing the act of sharing with the act of glorifying.  It’s as though they can’t separate what they personally consider “useful” or “interesting” from what they feel obliged to help promote because of their relatively impressive reach and influence.

However…

6.  You can learn a lot about people from what they share.

Chris Brogan is a social media maven, but what he shares in Google Reader reminds me he’s also deeply interested in theology and spirituality.  Mike Sorg is a veteran podcaster, but his shared items are a snapshot of comic books & general geekery.  And Mary Hartney is a journalist by trade, but her shared items lean heavily toward art, culture and food.

As such…

7.  I learned to share information more consciously.

On one hand, I want to share information I’m personally interested in.  And because my aforementioned interests exceed the limits of *just* social media, that means people who follow me on Reader are likely to see a lot of shared information about books, racism, economics and underwater sculpture.

On the other hand, Read It All Week made me highly conscious of the way each shared item encroaches on a reader’s available time.  It made me more reluctant to share items, because I didn’t want to sabotage the time & attention of the people who follow me.

Ultimately, I still did share items (because I would have whether it was Read It All Week or not), but fewer than I would have if I hadn’t been thinking about my time and yours.

8.  Believe it or not, I actually learned things.

My Reader, like yours, is full of information both great and pointless.  The trick, I learned, is to skim past the duds and invest in the quality — and, very often, that quality tends to bottleneck in a few sources.

For example, Atlantic Monthly columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates was on vacation during Read It All Week, so he asked three of his most trusted commenters (Brendan I. Koerner, Hua Hsu and Cynic) to fill in for him.  The result was the most compulsively readable blog of the week, covering ground from Shirley Sherrod to LeBron James, what happens when “fringe” cultures are assimilated into America’s mainstream and whether Jack London’s racism should mar his literary genius.

Had I ignored Reader (as I so often do), I would have missed these and dozens of other enlightening and captivating essays (like Kathleen Alcott’s masterpiece from The Rumpus), all because I was “too busy” doing… whatever it is I usually do.

Speaking of which…

9.  I did not go broke while reading.

On the contrary, last week was quite fruitful, business-wise.  I pitched a potential client, spoke at a live event and conducted a social media workshop, knocked out a guest post for Jim Kukral (peppered with knowledge I gleaned from blogs I rediscovered in Reader), and locked down two more business meetings for next week, all while executing the tasks I’m already contracted to do for my existing clients (and having a real life).

So if I can do all that while spending 8 hours reading blogs — which is only half the time I’d originally expected to invest — what am I usually doing that prevents me from staying up to date on the media I’ve subscribed to?

Probably tweeting.  In fact…

10.  What did I miss on Twitter?

During those 8 hours I was reading blogs, I kept a Twitter window open so I could chart how many tweets whizzed past me.  Turns out I missed over 2200 tweets.

That’s more than 2200 conversations I could have weighed in on, but didn’t.

Would engaging in some of those conversations have left me any better informed, connected or enriched than my time spent reading?  Possibly.  But I’ll never know.

And I’m okay with that.

What Happens Now?

Now I clean up my feeds.  (As opposed to Amber Naslund, who prefers to blow hers apart.)

I’ve already dropped from 63 blog subscriptions to 44 — that’s a 30% reduction.  However, most of those were blogs that hadn’t been recently updated.  (Imagine if they had…)

I’ll also reconsider how I follow people on Reader.  Since 2/5 of my time was expended on their recommendations, I need to ensure that their expertise is worth my time and attention.  But the quality and relevance of the items people choose to share is wildly unpredictable, so I can’t judge too quickly.

And, like Bryan Person, I may ultimately subdivide my subscriptions into two camps: what I should read, and what I could read (time permitting).

Because not everything I subscribe to is worth reading, but there are always pearls among the oysters.

The trick is to find them without losing my time… or my mind.

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On Sunday nights, Mack Collier runs a Twitter-based group chat called #blogchat, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about blogging while hobnobbing with their peers.

But, based on the defensive reaction to some of my comments from several of the #blogchat participants, I’ve realized that #blogchat is strictly a place for sunshine and puppies, and I rarely come armed with either.  So I thought I’d take the time to do some much-needed bubble-bursting here, rather than continuing to ruin the #blogchat vibe.

NOTE: If you cry at the sight of anything other than unicorns, hugs and kittens, please close this window now.  You’ll only depress yourself, and you’ll spend the next hour telling me why I’m wrong, when I don’t really care.

Still here?  Great.  Because…

1. There’s no rule that says you have to be nice in social media.

I know, all the important people are.  But I’m not important, so I don’t have to be.  And even if I was important, I’d probably still be an asshole.

(In fact, most people become assholes after they’re important, so the fact that I’m an asshole before becoming important means my assholishness is actually authentic.  And isn’t authenticity one of the social media cornerstones?)

2. All social media is not created equal.

Yes, the tools are “democratic,” inasmuch as anyone with an Internet connection can use Twitter.  But you are not Chris Brogan, nor are you Sara Schaefer.  You are you.  And you matter exactly as much as you matter, to whomever is counting.

To say that there’s “no social media hierarchy” or “no social media pecking order” is ludicrous.  Just because there isn’t an officially accredited list of A, B, C and Z-list bloggers doesn’t mean we don’t all know who they are, give or take a rung.

(And yes, you can be a Z-list blogger and still produce A-list work, and vice versa.  Quality and reach are two separate factors.  In the end, we’re judged according to other people’s criteria, not our own.)

3. I am not required to help you for free.

Granted, some people do it really badly, but yes, social media is a business.  Not for everyone, but for some people.  And no, they don’t have to help you, or give you free advice, or even be nice to you (see above).  Some of the nicest ones do; others don’t.  (Hell, I charge $200 for a lunch.)

Being nice is wonderful, but to anyone for whom social media is a business, what matters to them is paying the bills.  If they have time to be nice, or if being nice is part of their brand — and, therefore, their business — they’ll do it.  And, in general, social media people tend to be overly nice, almost to a fault (usually because they want you to talk about them).

But if you’re waiting for Seth Godin to write a guest post on your Blogger blog that has 2 subscribers because “helping people is the right thing to do,” don’t hold your breath.

Your two readers will be heartbroken if you asphyxiate.

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In January, I started bookmarking articles and videos I thought were exceptionally insightful, entertaining or relevant.  Reviewing them all at the end of the year would be too daunting, so here are some of the highlights I stumbled across in the first 3 months of 2010.*

(NOTE: I expected to summarize January through June here, but even that’s too much to plow through all at once.  Thus, I’ll be doing this in 3-month chunks.)

The Articles

Kurt Warner, The Great Unknowable Freak of the NFL

Will Leitch’s pitch-perfect assessment of Kurt Warner, the NFL quarterback who never should have existed:

I’ve seen Kurt Warner get angry on the field, I’ve seen him frustrated, I’ve seen him in pain … but I’ve never seen him nervous.  Warner plays like he knows how this story ends. Kurt Warner makes me want to be a better person. He makes me want to try to figure it all out. And he makes me want him to win, win, win, before it’s over, before the mystery vanishes, in a wisp, gone.

Ira Glass on the Creative Gap

Pete Michaud interviews This American Life host Ira Glass, who shares a great anecdote about how long it takes any creative person to stop being “good” and start being interesting.

A Short Collection of Unconventional Ideas

At The Art of Nonconformity, Chris Guillebeau posts a stark, inspirational, (admittedly pro-capitalist) real-world rundown of common sense observations designed to help you rethink who you are, what you’re doing and where you’re going.

A year after you leave college, no one will care what your GPA was.

Once you fully understand what you want, it’s not usually that difficult to get it.

Potential is good when you’re 15 years old. After that, you need to start doing something.

Less Talk, More Rock

Boing Boing urges a return to action instead of text.  And while they’re talking about video games, they could just as easily be talking about your life.

Go right from the inspiration — the vision — to actually making it. Don’t think it through. Don’t talk about it. Don’t plan it. Dive in and start making it happen. If you do that — if you can start rocking — you’ll get some momentum, and when you have some momentum then the project has a chance, because now you’re into it. It’s going somewhere, it’s tangible. Sure, you’ll still run up against problems to solve and decisions to make, but you’ll approach these in the moment and solve them in the moment. You’ll solve them so you can keep moving.

The Collapse of Complex Business Models

Clay Shirky on why the simplest solution to overcomplication isn’t “fixing it” but “blowing it up and starting over” — and what that means for businesses, governments and lives.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Vintage Posters for Modern Movies

Brain Pickings highlights some modernist-retro movie posters that don’t actually exist… but should.

Everywhere You Look, There You Are

One guy, a cigarette, and a story he just had to tell.

Last night Tyler and I met this odd guy at the eastbound MAX stop outside my apartment who I find strangely lingering in my mind today. Or maybe it’s not so strange…

Hard-Wiring Happiness

Brain Pickings features a video and quotes from Srikumar Rao’s talk about happiness at Columbia University.

You have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy. And the way we learn to be unhappy is by buying into a particular mental models. [...] The problem isn’t that we have mental models, the problem is that we don’t know we have mental models, we think that’s the way the world works.

Drive-By Culture and the Endless Search for New

Seth Godin makes a case for “deep experiences,” and explains why they’re so hard to find.

Mass marketing used to be able to have it both ways. Money bought you audience. Now, all that buys you a mass market is wow and speed. Wow keeps getting harder and dives for the lowest common denominator at the same time.

How I Retired at Age 25

Pete Michaud explains how a leap of faith and a surprise realization helped him quit his day job and never look back.

If I could offer only one piece of advice, this would be it: it doesn’t need to be perfect. Save perfection for your aimless hobbies. What you need to succeed is “barely passable“.

At First, I Was Like…

*NOTE: Not all of this media was created in 2010, but I first encountered it in 2010, so it was “current” to me in that moment.

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Screenwriter John August recently blogged about the Bechdel test, a (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek way to determine a film’s level of feminism.  It consists of three questions you can ask about any film:

1. Are there two or more female characters with names?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. If they talk to each other, do they talk about something other than a man?

Obviously, the test itself isn’t the point.  It’s intended to start a conversation about our media, our culture and, ultimately, why certain POVs (namely, that of straight white males) are so dominant compared to everyone else’s.

Nonetheless, as this video illustrates, you’d be surprised how many hit films fail the test.

As one of August’s commenters noted, it’s not just films that fail the Bechdel test, but novels and plays as well:

The same oversight exists in our nation’s public and independent high school English classes. Last year the most taught books in America were: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Huckleberry Finn, Julius Caeser, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, and The Odyssey… All of these texts fail the Bechdel test, too. Except for The Odyssey. Go figure.

So, it seems male-focused media has dominated our culture for centuries, and film is just the latest example of a classical bias reasserting itself.

(Un)fair enough.

What’s interesting to me is that film might also be the hardest medium to equalize.

Dudes in Motion

In Robert McKee’s screenwriting guide Story, he explains the differences in our popular media formats:

• Novels are tales of internal conflict, expressed through monologues
• Plays are tales of interpersonal conflict, expressed through dialogue
• Films are tales of external conflict, expressed through action

Again, as with the Bechdel test, there are exclusions, exceptions and overlaps.  But generally (and financially) speaking, McKee’s right: history’s most profitable films have been blockbusters built on spectacle.

Film is motion.  Film is action.  Films must be dynamic in order to justify paying $12 to sit in a dark room filled with strangers, all sharing the same communal experience of being driven to emotion by a series moving images.

Which is why I’m not so sure the Bechdel test, which hinges on two female characters talking, is an appropriate litmus test for film.

For a film to “work,” the action must solve the problem.  Thus, a better question might be whether a film’s female characters are able to solve their own problems without relying on the aid of the male characters.

(Of course, that still doesn’t excuse the Bechdelian failures of Shakespeare, but it’s worth mentioning that his plays were written in an era when all female roles would have been played by male actors anyway, so it’s something of a moot point.)

All of which also leads me to think, inevitably about the Internet.

Blog a Mile in My Shoes

If novels are the story of “s/he,” plays are the story of “them,” and film is the story of “it” (aka “the event”), then blogs, podcasts and videoblogs are the story of “I.”  And since the world is basically divided down the middle between males and females, that should mean that the web would be the most diverse pool of stories on the planet, right?

So why can I personally name so many more straight white male bloggers than I can any other social media demographic?

Simple: I’m a straight white male.  As such, I seek out the stories I can most easily identify with.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t also read blogs written by writers of different genders, ethnicities, ages and sexual orientations.  In fact, that’s why I believe the Internet can equalize the arguments created by the Bechdel test.

It’s Easier to Feel You When You’re Cheap

Films are expensive to make, which means they must appeal to the widest possible demographic in order to earn their money back.  And because they’re primarily made by white males, they’re primarily made for white males by default.  That’s the residual self-identification of the film industry, which was founded by white males and is only now evolving into a truly multicultural talent pool.

And yet, when’s the last time you watched a film about a culture other than your own, or a character you couldn’t immediately identify with?  (I know, I know: Slumdog Millionaire, the “Hey, we elected a black guy so we can stop talking about racism now” equivalent of the Academy Awards.)

Meanwhile, when’s the last time you read a blog (or a tweet) by someone who didn’t resemble you in a lineup?  Probably five minutes ago.

Now that it’s so easy for individuals to express themselves online, the inner thoughts of “others” are more accessible today than they’ve ever been before.  We don’t need bloated Hollywood productions, marketing armadas and bankable stars to convince us that someone else’s POV is worth our time and money to explore; we just need two minutes and YouTube.

Will this proximity to (and seeming acceptance of) “the other” online eventually lead us to be more tolerant of “other” POVs in more traditional media?  I think that’s inevitable, though it won’t happen completely until diversity is proven to be reliably profitable.

Until then, we’ll be stuck with more recreations of the same stories we’ve all seen for decades:

The ones that sell.

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I don’t know anybody who loves pop radio.

I know people who listen to it ironically, as though they’re not comfortable admitting they don’t entirely hate Lady Gaga.  And I know people who admit to liking just Lady Gaga, or just Usher, but still insist they “hate the radio.”

But why do we (claim to) hate pop music / pop media?

Why are we so eager to distance ourselves from “the norm?”

Let’s All Be Different Together (Because Being the Same Together Sucks)

We self-identify with people who dislike the same things (and in the same ways) as we do.

That means deriding the musical merit of Ke$ha is as much a prerequisite to being “taken seriously” by our peers as actually liking Spoon or My Morning Jacket; maybe even moreso, since individual opinions are more easily accepted by the fringe than popular appreciations are.  (In other words, you can spend the entire $1 draft night railing against MGMT as “sell-outs,” but you’re only allowed to play “Tik Tok” on the jukebox if you agree to sing and dance like a self-aware parody of someone who’s actually happy.)

Happiness also plays a huge part in this shell game.

As I’ve mentioned before, the ’80s were the last time pop culture was allowed to be happy without angering the intellectuals.  In the ’90s, grunge made joy obsolete.  In the ’00s, the left’s perception of the Bush administration was akin to a country being held hostage by its leaders; to enjoy life would be to give up and blindly accept all the shit Bush was shoveling.

Misery is serious business; only intellectual plebians with no understanding of the long term impact of their actions could possibly find anything to be happy about.

Especially “popular” music.

So we all hate it.  Together.

You Suck Just Like I Do! Let’s Be BFFs!

It doesn’t help that Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and most other modern multi-platinum musical phenomena benefit from:

• criminally simplistic lyrics
• monotonously propulsive rhythms, and
• a studied amateurishness that teases the public into believing that we, too, are just one Auto-Tune squiggle away from becoming international superstars.

In the ’80s, Madonna and Janet Jackson were personae that women aspired to be like; in the ’10s, Ke$ha and Gaga are women you probably already are like — or, if you’re a guy, they’re women you think you actually stand a chance of sleeping with.  No one had those illusions about Madonna, but reality culture means our stars seem touchable, so supporting them is a lot like supporting our friends.

We don’t think of Gaga and Ke$ha as being part of the system; they make us feel like they rely on us to help them reinvent the system.

Gaga earned her audience on YouTube.  Ke$ha made her name on MySpace.  They didn’t need labels to convince us they were worth paying attention to; now their fans are patting themselves on the back because they told the labels who they wanted to support and the labels listened.  (Never mind that this just makes us complicit in the system, only from the inside-out.)

The Last Overnight Sensation I Felt Required a Tissue

50 years ago, pop music took weeks or months to sweep the nation, much less the globe.

50 years ago, a popular film might stay in first-run theaters for more than a year.

Today, all media is hyper-compressed into a mash-up driven culture where identifying, judging, assimilating and reinventing a piece of media happens in the blink of an eye.  Today, Lady Gaga has to perpetually shock us, because the impact of each shock wears off much more quickly than the last one did.

Perhaps those of us who maintain a love-hate relationship with pop culture feel this way because we doubt the long-term survivability of memes and media that sweep the globe overnight.  History will be history when we get there; for now, we’re just waiting for the next Black Eyed Peas album.

But something has to be pretty damn good — or at least pretty damn effective — to become popular… doesn’t it?

Maybe not.

Bludgeon Me Until I Care

On a recent weekday, I was subjected to just over 2 hours of pop radio in Baltimore.  (Disclosure: this was in a cafe where I was working remotely, so I had no control over their radio choices.)  In that timeframe, I heard:

4 x Lady Gaga songs (though never the same one twice)
3 x Ke$ha songs (one repeated)
2 x Usher “OMG”
2 x La Roux “Bulletproof”
2 x Jay-Z “Young Forever”
2 x Justin Timberlake “Carry Out”

… and so on.

Are these songs worth hearing once an hour?  Are they the best songs the record labels can provide us with right now?

Probably not.  But they are the ones the record labels have decided to promote.  And if they’re promoted enough, they become popular by sheer force of marketing will.

So perhaps what people hate isn’t the pop media, but the subconscious realization that the media conglomerates can afford to bludgeon us repeatedly with the same songs, movies and messages until we recognize them, which breeds, if not appreciation, then at least familiarity.  Safety.  Comfort.  Approval by association.

We don’t hate pop culture.  We hate being programmed.  And we hate ourselves for submitting to it, or for not having the knowledge or the means to avoid it.

Although…

… the more I hear it, I do have to admit that one Lady Gaga song is pretty good…

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If you write, speak or perform for a living, you need an audience.  Without one, you don’t get paid.  (Hell, online, you still don’t get paid even with one.  But I digress…)

Your audience is one way to validate your success as a communicator.

But your audience is also a trap.

If they love you, their adulation becomes addictive.  You learn what they like, what they respond to, and what makes them appreciate you more.  Naturally, you’re inclined to pursue those reactions because they make you feel good, and that means you’re less likely to experiment with anything outside your audience’s comfort zone.

Which Begs the Question…

What’s more important to you: how your work makes you feel, or how your audience makes you feel?

If you want to grow as a creator or performer, you may need to push your own boundaries.  You may need to say and do things your audience won’t like / understand / appreciate, so you can learn from your own experiences — whether your audience enjoys it or not.

Do you worry that your audience may not follow you down every rabbit hole you want to investigate?  Don’t be.  The fewer people  you have paying attention to you, the freer you are to innovate (and learn from your mistakes) without being judged.

And if your audience complains, derides or discounts your divergence from “the norm,” relax.  They’re only people, just like you.  In fact, there are plenty of…

Reasons NOT to Listen to Your Audience

… including:

• Your audience doesn’t always know what you know.
• Your audience doesn’t always know what THEY know, either.
• Your audience has different goals than you do.
• Sometimes your audience is your competition.
• Your audience is afraid to look stupid, needy or uncool.

History is filled with the tales of innovators who were initially (or repeatedly) ignored or disparaged by their audiences, from Vincent van Gogh to Dr. Seuss.  For every film or book we now consider to be an influential classic, there are dozens of reviews that disregard it as amateur, ineffectual or just plain bad.

And those are the successes.

Sometimes, your ideas really aren’t all that great.  Sometimes they’re half-baked, incorrect, premature or — yes — just plain bad.

But if you don’t pursue them, and learn from the experience of your hard-fought victories and spectacular misfires, you’ll forever be clinging to the safe bets.

And that means your audience, fickle creatures that they are, will eventually abandon you anyway, transfixed instead by something newer, shinier and more compelling — something that pushes their boundaries, even while you refuse to test your own.

Of Course, There IS a Catch to This Advice…

If your audience isn’t always right when they disagree with you, then they’re not always right when they idolize you, either.  Their judgment is just as flawed, mercurial and subjective as yours is, rain or shine.

So yes, by all means, absorb your audience’s feedback.

Just make sure you keep their notes in pencil.

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Last year, Barrett Garese wrote a thought-provoking essay about the future of film, TV and the web.  When I realized my response to his post was longer than a single comment ever should be, I blogged my response on my old blog.  One week later, I relocated from Blogger to WordPress and most of my old thoughts were left behind.

Now, this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about media forms.  And as I started to write today’s post, I realized Barrett’s essay and my response are still as relevant as they were a year ago.  So I’ve republished my old post below, with a new afterword.

********

As a former agent at UTA, Barrett Garese has better insight into the future of media than most of us do, and he’s blogged a fascinating essay about where he thinks film, TV and web content is headed. (In a nutshell, he believes the key is to capitalize on the inherent differences of each platform, rather than insisting on convergence.)

While reading his essay, I realized my own response would be longer than appropriate for his comment column, so I’ve posted it here. My thoughts will make more sense if you’ve read Barrett’s essay as a primer, but I think these points stand on their own as well.

I’ll Stop the World and Converge With You…

The convergence of film, TV and web is happening, but that doesn’t dilute the power of each individual experience.  Film is still film, TV is still TV, web is still web, etc.  But what this does create is a NEW possibility: the convergent format, in which content is specifically designed to either:

A) feel different across all platforms (i.e., the viewing experience is engineered to suit each specific screen size or format.  For example, producers could edit different versions of the same show by using different shots or angles — such as including more motion on TV or film, but more closeups and static shots for web and mobile.)

… or:

B) be different across all platforms (i.e., the web version of a show is completely different, while still complementary in theme, to the film or TV version.  For example, a TV series could unfold in real time, but the show’s website could post weekly 3-minute flashbacks that add context to last week’s conflicts).

Your Home Theater Is Not Actually a Theater.

Audiences anticipate different experiences based on the distribution method.

We expect to immerse ourselves in a film experience (minus the live distractions), while we expect to be distracted from the TV experience (because we’re at home). Thus, we’re already anticipating a different kind of content to be shared across those varied platforms — and when the end result doesn’t match our expectations, our engagement with that content may suffer. (Or, it may surprise us.)

We also expect a difference in on-screen quality relative to the effort it takes to obtain the image.  For example, driving to a theater at 7 PM should reward me with a higher quality experience than watching something on my phone at 3 AM.

And, we expect the content to connect with us on levels that equal our applied (and uninterrupted) attention.  Mindblowing films can’t be processed in 5 minute increments via stolen wi-fi during your lunch break, yet 3 hours in a theater had better provide you with a deeper and more profound experience than 30 consecutive episodes of Tiki Bar TV (which, it should be said, I love).

LOOK AT ME.

The biggest expense for online content should be promotions. You can create an amazing show for $5, but you’re still releasing it into a medium that A) not enough people are paying attention to, yet which is B) paradoxically flooded with crap (which may explain A).

If I were to produce a new web series (after concluding Something to Be Desired), I’d be sure that the promotional plan was in place before the first episode ever hit the web.  The days of “throwing it out there and seeing what happens” are best left to people experimenting in their own free time, not people who expect to gain the traction that validates (both artistically AND financially) their investment of time, money and effort.

Whither the Studios?

Eventually, existing corporate studio behemoths will become distribution companies that happen to have (exclusive?) contracts with production houses. Instead of producing AND distributing their own in-house content, they’ll profit from their primary assets (reach and volume) and leave the creative aspects to contracted producers — who will in turn be grateful to not have to worry about being both creative and ubiquitous at the same time.

That said, there will always be exceptions. In the long run, it’s still cheaper for Verizon to produce its own web shows than it is for them to subcontract with a production company, and it’s still more profitable for an indie prodco to bootstrap their way into self-distribution than it is for them to produce their own content but only keep a percentage of eventual revenues.

A Soap Opera Without the Soap Had Better Be a Damn Good Opera

Content producers need to rely less on advertising and more on the inherent value of the content itself. Gone are the days when content is produced as a lure to hook viewers into sitting through commercials — nor can content *be* produced under a presumed business model that eyeballs = advertising opportunities = profit.

If you cut out the middleman of advertising, what are you left with?

You’re left with an audience who’ll pay you directly for what you create — or for the experience it creates in them — rather than a vessel with holes waiting to be plugged by commercials.

This also impacts media that’s produced for traditional, large-scale distribution. Just because a show isn’t pulling in the millions of eyeballs it needs to validate its TV time slot, it doesn’t mean that show couldn’t be profitable at a lower operating cost with web-based distribution.

If I were the producers of a canceled darling like Pushing Daisies (and if I still owned the rights to that property), I would shrink the budget, post 15-20 minute episodes (or segments) online, and invite the fans to pre-pay for next season’s DVD in advance.  That initial influx of cash could be used to fund part of the upcoming season, which means the prodco isn’t scrambling to line up sponsors now and then waiting for a year-end DVD windfall to break even.

Afterword

Since Barrett and I forecast the future of web media one year ago, services like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have come to my attention.

As “crowdfunding” sources, these sites enable aspiring artists, authors, filmmakers and designers to obtain the funds necessary to launch their ideas without begging for traditional sponsorship, investors or distribution deals.  For example, filmmaker Gregory Bayne raised more than $25,000 to fuel one documentary, while author Robin Sloan nearly quadrupled his initial funding request of $3,500.

So… if we can free ourselves from the need for advertising, and if crowdfunding now makes it easier to get more complicated projects off the ground… what might the future of easily-funded, “owe-nothing” media-driven business models look like?

And, how will the media created by these new artrepreneurs change our future predictions?

Image by perreira.

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What if our newspapers were filled with articles on how to write for newspapers?

What if the only books we printed were books about how to sell books?

What if TV shows consisted solely of monologues about TV?

I doubt we’d have much use for them at all.

So why do we accept it in social media?

The Three Pillars of Social Media Content

If you blog, podcast or otherwise create media for web-based distribution, you probably talk ad nauseam about one of three topics:

• How to create web content
• How to monetize web content
• Yourself

Notice that you probably don’t talk about the subject matter of your content, because your content is its own subject matter.

Crazy, isn’t it?

We blog about blogging.  We market about marketing.  And, when we’re not selling our expertise, we sell ourselves.  It’s the equivalent of painters forever painting portraits of themselves painting their own self-portraits.  I can’t imagine another medium that would exist solely to justify and perpetuate its own existence, and yet that’s precisely what we do here.

It’s ugly.  It’s desperate.  It’s solipsistic.  (Look it up.)  And it makes for one anemic defense of an industry.

It’s almost like social media labors under the suspicion that if it stops talking about itself, it’ll cease to exist.

Which begs the question: does social media exist?  Or are we making the whole thing up?

If a Tree Falls in the Woods and No One Retweets It…

The social side of social media revolves around techniques meant to get others talking about you.  The media side of the equation is less about the form of the content and more about its distribution.  Mobile, web-based, downloadable, subscribable…  These aren’t media forms.  These are means of distribution.

What we have is people using multiple channels to convince you of their own merit, mostly so you’ll talk about them — and, specifically, so you’ll talk about their vast array of expertise, in subjects like…

• creating content,
• monetizing content, and
• themselves

Is it any wonder that people believe Twitter is a wasteland of people discussing airports and breakfast cereal?

Are you shocked when the level of social media discourse reported by CNN or Nightline amounts to the same uninformed, knee-jerk reactions we already ignore when we scan through blog comments, but which the mainstream media somehow thinks represents America’s profound and timely wisdom?

Of course, it aggravates those of us who believe in the potential of social media, and it motivates us to prove the naysayers wrong.

But here’s the catch:

What if they’re right?

Does a Computer Know It’s a Computer?

If our entire medium did exist solely to justify its own existence, surely we’d recognize that lunacy and abandon it for something legitimately meaningful.  Right?

Only if we can diagnose our own insanity.

Look at the blogs you subscribe to, the tweeters you follow and the podcasts you download.  What percentage of those sources focus on something other than social media itself?

Look at your own output.  What do you write or speak about most often?  Is it a topic that has to be explained to anybody who hasn’t heard of Chris Brogan?

Odds are, those odds aren’t good.

So why do we do this?

And what would happen if we didn’t?

I Wrote a Play About This Playwright Who Writes Plays About Playwrights Who…

What if you spent more time writing and reading about a topic other than the web itself?

Who’s creating dynamic media that happens to be online, rather than media that only matters online?

How can you use social media to teach others about a subject besides social media?

(You do have other interests, don’t you?)

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to perpetually explain what you did to people (and why), because the value of what you do would be obvious even to people who don’t own smartphones and who think Amber Naslund was the bassist in Jem?

I know, it’s a scary idea.  The first rule of Fight Club was “don’t talk about Fight Club,” because if you did talk about Fight Club, then Fight Club might cease to exist.

With us, it’s the opposite: if we stop talking about social media, then we cease to exist.

Or, more specifically, we cease to exist in our own little fishbowl.

But if we’re only special to each other, we’re not really special at all, are we?

We’re just people with make-believe jobs and titles, who invent our own conferences and pay to hear each other speak about speaking about talking about blogging about ourselves.

And call me a cynic, but I think we can do better.

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Writing a blog in the hopes that you’ll get noticed — or hired — is extremely passive-aggressive.

Most people who’ve made money have made it by pursuing it.  Therefore, they respect what they recognize, which is a desire to achieve.  So, by pursuing work and striving to get their attention, your actions resonate with them.

Meanwhile, posting amazing free content to your blog on a daily basis, and then hoping someone will someday think, “Gee, I wonder what he’d do if I paid him,” is the antithesis of go-getter moxie.

Consider the guy who claimed to land a job by manipulating Google.  He didn’t just get hired because he was creative; he got hired because he got noticed.

He could have also written a blog post about how great he was, and then hoped that his six art directors of choice would find that post while Googling, read it, realize he was a genius and call him for an interview.

But that would have been stupid.  And desperate.  And passive.  And failed.

Stop being all of those things.

Does That Mean I Should Self-Promote Endlessly?

No.  No it does not.

Look at that Google guy again.  Did he spam the world with his joblessness?  No.  He targeted six art directors he knew he’d like to work for, and he got his message in front of them.

That’s the other difference between being aggressive and being passive-aggressive: identifying the target.

If you believe in yourself, then you’ll be confident in walking your message directly to the right person’s doorstep.*

If you don’t, you’ll spraypaint your desires all over the web, in the hopes that someone — anyone — will notice you, and take pity on you, and drag you home to their quonset hut to nurse you back to health.

Do you want a specific result, or any result?

Skip the hut, and find the right doorstep.

The 5-Step Process to Get Hired Using Social Media

1.  Know what you want to get paid for.

2.  Do that work for free.  (This is called practice.)

3.  Become better at doing it for free than the people who currently get paid to do it.

4.  Figure out who pays people to do it, and show them what you do.

5.  Tell them how much you’ll do it for.

Repeat steps 1-5 until you find yourself gainfully employed.

But Wait!  There’s a Bonus Step!

6.  Write a book about how you landed your dream job using social media — and sell it.

Wasn’t that easy?

*Not someone’s face, mind you.  Their doorstep.  And recognize when you’ve been ignored vs. when you’ve been invited in.  Adults respond to confidence; teenage girls respond to bravado.  Unless you want to be employed by a teenage girl, understand the tonal difference in your delivery.

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One of the web’s primary flaws is that it’s actually too easy to use.

And as content becomes ever easier to create, finding quality content becomes even more difficult.

That’s the general premise of Andrew Keen‘s Cult of the Amateur, which lobbies for the return of cultural gatekeepers.  It’s when those gatekeepers are reinstated, Keen argues, that the cream [at least according to the gatekeeper's opinion] of YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, etc., will rise to the top more easily, while the trash will sink to the bottom.

But even if that idyllic (if patriarchal) picture did occur, we’d still have one big problem:

Who’d actually bother to watch quality content?

“Quality” implies an investment of time and effort from both the creator and the audience.

And that’s problematic because, at its root, the web operates as a series of willful disruptions.

Is the vast majority of the content on YouTube actually good?  No.  But that doesn’t stop swarms of people from creating (and watching) millions of videos every day.  For them, a lack of quality is not a deterrent.

In fact, it may even be the point.

Short Attention Span Theater

The very act of “surfing the web” implies a constant state of motion.  Ideas collide.  Interests expand.  The citizens of the web spend their entire online lives as willing nomads in search of ever-newer stimuli.

In such a milieu, breadth trumps depth and skimming supersedes absorbing.  Our eyes are drawn to bullet points, pull quotes and captions — any shortcuts that help us grok the gist of something without actually needing to process it completely.

And it’s not (entirely) our fault.

The media we create — and our ability to process it — is constantly evolving.  Our post-MTV generation can now intuit the complete meaning of a film from a 30 second preview, thus rendering the viewing of the film itself unnecessary.

We’ve become so familiar with the formula of information, it’s increasingly difficult for media creators to reward our attention by providing us with actual revelations.

So we skim.  Chronically.

And who can blame us?

Why read a book when you can read the CliffsNotes for five books in the same amount of time?  (Or, more likely, when you can skim a few pages of the CliffsNotes and then do well enough on the subsequent test to pass it, which invalidates the need to read the book in the first place.)

Why surrender our attention to one-way media like novels and films when video games and social networks provide us with the illusion of control, choice and unpredictability?

Why invest ourselves in one piece of media when so many others might be worth our time?

Being Unfulfilled Is My Default State of Mind

I’m no stranger to the paradox of quality.  One of my own complaints about the web is its lack of content that blows my mind and inspires me to action.

And yet, whenever I find a piece of media that has the potential to do such a thing, I immediately become desperate to click away from it at the earliest possible convenience.

Why?

Because no matter what I’m doing online, I always feel like I should be doing something else.

I used to think this was my reaction to the generally poor quality of the web overall.  But now I’m not so sure.

Because even as Google, social networks and other disruptors work night and day to disprove Andrew Keen’s premise simply by making it easier to find good content, I don’t find that I’m actually spending any more time with the good content I do find.

I just spend my time finding more of it.

It’s as though the web’s old problem — a lack of quality — has been replaced by a new problem — too much quality, or at least, quality that’s too easy to find.

Sooner or later, we all find the information, entertainment or enlightenment we’ve been searching for.  And it’s getting sooner and sooner all the time, until we no longer have the time to make use of what we did need because we’ve already discovered something new that we’d rather have.

In order to actually stop and absorb the information and insights at our disposal, we’d need to switch off the parts of our brains that feel compelled to find more of the same and just be content with what’s in front of us at the moment.

And I’m not sure we’re wired that way anymore.

In fact, maybe Andrew Keen was on to something.  But his premise is still flawed.  It’s not that we need gatekeepers to help us find the good stuff; we just need them to stop us from finding too much.

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