David Barrie

The Aggregator

Via Chris Anderson's Long Tail site comes an updated report by Bear, Sterns & Co. on user-generated content and the 'long tail'.

The report charts the value and trend of aggregating media and is a call to traditional media producers and 'content kings' to deepen engagement.

Two things in this report are particularly interesting.

First, the authors believe that what's known as the "paradox of choice" - you know, the thing where there's so much for us consumers to choose from that we pack up our bags and don't bother to buy anything -

will increase the value of "middlemen", or packagers of content that can appropriately filter out the noise and connect users with the content that appeals to their interests.

Then there's the point that one benefit of broadband video content is the ability to monetize eyeballs and clicks with video ads that

incorporate the "emotive power" and visual and audio qualities of traditional TV advertisement (albeit likely shorter in length).

Something weird, challenging and exciting is going on. 

Received wisdom was once that 'content is king'. What the report suggests is that 'great content is' and the remaining cultural and commercial impact is in 'filtration'.

This starts to put in to a new context the extending role of architects, producers and packagers in the design and delivery of all sorts of things, including public services,  SIV-lites, pop charity (Bono) and friendship (Facebook).

Is 'aggregation' what the butler does in a personalised service economy?

The other thing is that since the 1990s, assumption has been that we live in a 'Three Minute Culture':  something that pop promo directors have loved and the intellectual cogniscenti have decried and which has served to clear out a lot of the boring, ponderous stuff in broadcast media.

But the idea that as broadband video prevails, so will traditional TV qualities is plain silly.

If you're like me, anything on You Tube over one minute ten seconds is boring. And aggregated consumption is not just about filtration - it's about readjusting your attention span.

Upwardly mobile

In a restaurant this week, I picked up a flyer asking for people to participate in a new TV series produced by Silver River.

The flyer asked the reader to consider an ultimate adventure and participate in a social experiment for a Channel 4 documentary about consumer culture:

Is it possible to have a life without spending?....What would happen if you stopped shopping? What difference would it make to your quality of life and would it be an easy way to go 'green'?

So now we know, not spending money = an easy way to go green.

I hope to God that this TV series puts out a more meaningful message: not least because it's becoming bloody hard to be austere these days and genuinely invoke the spirit of the Blitz.

Allotment food growing is  accompanied by coffee-table almanacs.

And carbon diets are in danger of being accompanied by lashings of gas-guzzling manners.

I've just read that RREEF, an investment arm of Deutsche Bank have recently bought an Essex caravan park for £5m and plan to replace vans with timber lodges, potentially for Londoners buying second homes and not looking to travel abroad for their holidays. This is the first fund manager to buy in to the sector and puts to rest any dream of eco-friendly and escapist caravanserai.

Marching brands

Gentrification is often expressed in terms of displaced residents and loss of amenity. The story goes that poor people and honest retailers move on for Soave-drinking investors and retailers of expensive lampshades.

A recent article  in real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required] gave a richer insight in to both cause and effect.

In the early 1990s, fashion brand J Crew occupied a shop on Prince Street, SoHo, New York at $60 per sq ft.
Today, rents stand at $400 per sq ft. Do the maths yourself.

The watershed moment for the market in Soho was in 2004 when mainstream brand Bloomingdale's took a store at 504 Broadway. The effect on the real estate market and personality of the area was seismic:

Imagine Selfridges taking a store in Hoxton, and you begin to get an idea of the significance.

The comment doesn't just reflect the supertanker-ness of some real estate investment in urban areas but also is a reminder that gentrification is about brands dislocating cool and marketers acquiring new positions, not the Korean-style trans-shipment of urban underclass.

The Madonna of the Hooped Earrings

For all of culture's post-post-post-clever-dick-ness, thank God we still like messaging in ways that are superficial.

Here's a picture I took yesterday of the outside of a building on the Piazza della Republica in Florence, Italy.

The facade of the building is a painted architectural drape, slung over the structure while it's renovated.

Layered on top is a Guess billboard with an Olympia-style, drop dead gorgeous blonde.

Then there's the crap, artless Art Nouveau-y comma of a lamp-post.

You can almost run your fingers across the surface of this bit of ur-landscape.

It's fab, picturesque and more Duccio and Giotto-like than the Sultans of High Art would like to admit.

Human parachutes

'The Falling Man' of 9/11 captured the horror of enforced suicide.

In their brilliant biography of Chairman Mao, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday present another, earlier and perhaps more shocking form of death decision.

In the early 1950s, according to Jung and Halliday, between two and three hundred thousand Chinese committed suicide during two totalitarian, anti-corruption purges,  known as the 'Three Antis' and the 'Five Antis'.

In Shanghai so many people jumped from buildings that they acquired the nickname 'parachutes'.

One eyewitness wondered why people jumped in to the street rather than into the river. The reason, he discovered, was that they wanted to safeguard their families:

If you jumped into the Huangpu River and were swept away so the Communists didn't have a corpse, they would accuse you of having escaped to Hong Kong and your family would suffer. So the best way was to leap down the street.

Until I had read this, I'd always thought that suicide and social conscience were mutually exclusive.

Official and unofficial Futures

The idea of civil society has been at the center of public service reform for several years.

Its promotion has been encouraged by the rise of third-party government and need to provide higher-quality, more citizen and choice-centered public services.

Government has celebrated people as agents of change and created opportunities for committed citizens and motivated amateurs to take centre stage and make public policy.

Cultural and commercial accomplices have included user-friendly, user-generated media platforms.

And the feeling of a citizen revolution has been promoted by calls to arms of events like Making Poverty History and Earth Aid.

What's followed in public management is a boom in 'public consultation' by service providers, the rise of initiatives such as participatory budgeting and the positioning of the Third Sector as a deliverer of public services.

But for every step forward in giving  'power to the people', there appears to be ever-increasing powerless-ness or people behaving in ways that increase the 'democratic deficit'.

In Unlocking Innovation, a recent paper by the policy think tank Demos, writer Melissa Mean gets under the lid of the dilemma.

Over the last year, Demos has been running a participatory planning initiative in Glasgow, Scotland, in which people have visioned the future of their city.

Understanding the value of her project, Melissa writes:

The problem with official futures is that they swallow people's sense of agency.

Everywhere you look in Government just now, there are official futures: strategies, visions, shining spires, guidebooks that enable the new mantra of 'direction of travel'.

This visioning is pepper-potted with initiatives that enable alternative, popular versions of the future to flourish.

But the two often don't link up and the unofficial is allowed to flourish, selectively pick-and-mixed and used to celebrate process, not outcome.

In their book Governing By Network, Stephen Goldsmith and William D. Eggers reveal a possible reason.

They identify accountability as one of the most difficult challenges of an age of government that parcels authority and responsibility throughout a network of partners.

For networks to work effectively, their architects need to define the public good they want to produce, set goals and find ways in which those goals can get pushed down the network of project partners.

Goldsmith and Eggers say that:

...getting buy-in to the goals at the beginning can help rally people around them later.

Maybe because many projects are motivated by getting buy-in, they don't actually get under our skin; and they fall short of an architecture of management that enables  self-organization.

Social networking media and knowledge sharing tools like Facebook and Wikipedia seem to hit the spot.

They allow popular participation, collaboration and allow people to design their own space.

They allow people to fashion outcomes and build them in cellular ways, not just act as consumers and buy a once in a lifetime offer.