<nettime> People Want to Know...

[Tom Sherman <twsherma@mailbox.syr.edu>]

PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW WHAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE THINKING

Tom Sherman, 1999


There are excellent business opportunities in the fields of new media and
information technologies.  The digital culture is evolving quickly and new
markets are emerging and developing at breathtaking speed.

I overhead a couple of experienced information producers talking about a
number of projects they launched way back in the old days...way back in
1995.  One of these IPs turned his attention and the conversation to the
present, saying these are incredibly exciting times we're living in.  I
thought to myself, we all have to play the cards we are dealt, and that
life is short and precious, and that all times are exciting when you're
living.

Things are moving very fast today, and being and staying nimble is the key
to survival and growth.  Whether you're an artist or a hack, there isn't
enough time to put things on paper and expect to see them realized.  By
the time you write up a proposal and flog it to prospective backers,
someone else has acted on your ideas.  Nothing succeeds like success.  
Money is quick.  It takes money to make money. There's a lot of money
migrating to the net.  Everything is migrating to the net. Music, TV,
movies, art, real estate--you name it--content is being transformed into
the new media in waves.  Digital tidal waves.  Investing money in new
media is easy. Getting something back is a whole other matter.

The first question is how do you leverage eyeballs to your website?  Once
you have them, how do you rivet or transfix them?  How do you immobilize
them and shake them down?  How do you put their asses in the seats?  Can
you translate this attention and temporary paralysis into commerce?  At
what point is it safe to try to move them?  Can you deliver objects they
can touch and feel, things they want, or even people they want to meet in
the flesh?
  
You can't make any money with advertising alone.  Advertising alone is
dead on the net.  In 1999 the average cost of advertising on the web is
$52. U.S. dollars per thousand pairs of eyeballs.  You have to attract a
lot of attention to make any money with advertising, and you can't sustain
it.  The way to go is advertising plus e-commerce on the back-end.  Get
them for looking and send them home with something for their trouble.  
You have to have goods or services to sell from your site.  Today
e-commerce is mostly click and ship, but shipping will gradually be
eliminated by direct download.  Boxes versus bandwidth.  Of course there
are always going to be things you can't download.  Where pictures of naked
bodies are simply ideal for direct download, prostitutes still have to be
shipped.

As you can imagine, setting up a venture in new media is risky business.
But there are ways to cope with the hazards.  Management is a science,
afterall. Operations research and organizational theory, applied
successfully for decades in traditional manufacturing, are now applied
effectively in the management of new media companies.  Ongoing operations
research provides algorithms for handling difficult decision-making,
decisions that have to be made on the fly in the face of high levels of
uncertainty.  Organization theory now includes a range of horizontal or
non-hierarchical management strategies.  Employees can be given a sense of
freedom and independence, but can be exploited in much the same way that
new media companies exploit their customers, by systematically tracking
behaviour and anticipating and facilitating the delivery or extraction of
relevant information.  People want to know what other people are thinking.

Staying one step ahead of the competition and the customers demands
considerable efforts in research and development.  Horizontal, or more
organic management structures, permit the integration of R & D into daily
service and production routines.  Teams that are emotionally healthy and
intellectually stimulated develop new methodologies quickly and grow
content naturally.

New media companies manage creativity and wherever creativity is
encouraged, there will be cost over-runs.  Take programming for example.  
Managing programmers is like managing cats.  What you want to avoid is R &
D on the left side of R.  Good luck.  Given free reign, creative people
will always expand their mess. Even in the best scenario creative types
will always want to expand the number of ways they can do the same thing.  
Managing creative people is expensive.  Containment is absolutely
necessary.  Containment is accomplished only through structure and overt
surveillance.  People want to know what other people are thinking.  What
you want is R & D on the right side of D.  That's product.  The
development of something people can use.  Something people will buy into.

The new media business rides the new culture of convenience.  All network
culture is about making connections and getting what you want.  
Immediately.  Everything in the world is potentially available 24/7.  
Content is important, but content is useless unless it is easy to access
and a pleasure to consume.  The key player in new media is the usability
architect.  Successful companies approach every endeavour with a usability
analysis first.  They lean heavily on their usability architect from the
get-go.  Usability factors drive the initial development of a project
description, the targeting of audiences, and the determination of
stakeholders.  Application structure and site, and interface design
rationale, are not left until the very end, but actually determine and
control the development of a project from its genesis.

Prior to the actual launch, essential issues like hosting, anticipated
community interaction and site maintenance must be dealt with.  And, of
course, what are your e-commerce options?  Do you intend to update and
expand your site?  If so, what are you doing in terms of stickiness?  
Today's user has the attention span of a housefly.  What percentage of the
project budget is set aside for updating and maintenance?  Information
refreshment.  Or perhaps you are just going for the quick hit, assuming
early abandonment.  The choice is yours.  In these early stages of the
information era, leaving abandoned sites on servers, with or without
active addresses, is not a big deal.  From an economic perspective, rotten
information, digital trash, hasn't built up to a problematic level yet.  
Information garbage disposal and recycling are not yet profitable.

It is essential that IPs think about their work from the user's
perspective.  In the simplest terms, what is the project?  After you have
an explanation that will hold water, who is your lawyer and accountant?  
Financiers will always want guarantees when projects appear insecure.  
Most will want to hold material equity against virtual equity.  Nothing
succeeds like success.  Diverse, well-grounded corporations and companies
with material assets can move quickly in uncertain, etherial territories.  
Ideas are ten-a-penny.  Never put money into business ventures so far
ahead of the competition that there is supposedly no competition.  Sweat
equity is a factor, but never enough to close a deal.  Stay clear of
public money.  It is too slow.  Professional development scenarios are for
losers.  Governments do provide market assistance, grants or loans to
boost budgets, or distribute survival funding.  Bureaucrats pretending
they are in business make things crawl with their political instincts to
cover their asses.

Demos, pilots, trailers, can be constructed and pitched without worrying
about copyright.  Sketches of ideas are made quick and dirty.  Stealing or
lifting are essential shortcuts when trying to get out of the gate
quickly.  When you are pitching, anything goes.  You know damn well that
copyright is theft, a legal structure that is set up to block and incumber
newcomers.  But once you have a toe-hold, once you have something that
resembles a property, never give up your copyright. Launches will fail,
projects will stall, but copyrights are copyrights.  Always maintain your
copyrights.

The new media business is really a resource industry.  Audiences are
cultivated to be mined and processed.  Sets of eyeballs are attracted and
sorted like eggs. Eyeballs are lured into portals, or general
intersections of the web.  Portals are like local neighbourhoods or
watering holes.  The killer application of portals is still e-mail.  
People want to know what other people are thinking.  In the portals the
audiences are divided into special groups.  Vortals.  Vortals are vertical
portals.  A vortal might offer vegetarian recipes or a chat-line for
specific monkey business, say sex between large consenting primates with
missing limbs.  Links and analogies may be made between the content of
related vortals.  Thus hortals, horizontal, lateral or associative
-ortals, may be formed, creating a buzz between vortals.  The gap is
always where it's at.  The object is to grab people and hold them, without
letting them know they are captured, permitting them to move around in a
loop.  Companies operating portals, vortals and hortals form partnerships
and affiliate relationships.  If a portal sends a user to a vortal, then
the portal expects to receive compensation from the vortal for the
delivery, and vice versa, and so on and so on.

These people are the content aggregators.  They mix content from diverse
locales, making something whole out of bits of this and that.  They bring
together many parts, divergent forms and styles, into aggregate
substantiation.  They take sterile, minimal, empty landscapes and mix up a
new world, making things more naturally complex and substantially whole.  
Aggregators make the world up from scratch, over and over again.  They
create value by refreshing or updating the mix--or from the user's
perspective, the fix.  They are in the business of refreshing reality.

Everybody's killer app, oddly enough, is still e-mail.  Everyone seems to
be investing in the English language.  It's a deadly virus in its own
right, a plague on other tongues.  Other languages are abandoned as droves
migrate into English, stretching it and murdering it with their own
brutally pragmatic style.  It absorbs everyone in the interest of global
communication.  English is the common ground for a new formalism.  If you
think about it, the English language itself becomes the content.  It
doesn't matter what people are writing.  The language is all you can see
after a while.  The web is even worse.  It is a horribly stiff, awkward
conglomeration of technically restricted design modules reducing
creativity to insignificant twitches too often interpreted as societal
glitches.  English is a predominant medium like video or the web.  These
media are ubiquitous and common and virtually free for all to invest in.  
It is such a consistent world, a world of homogenization or loss, of
stifling commonality and evaporating difference--but also of gain, of
profit, that certain sameness of a shared, familiar reality.

Sometimes it defies logic what you can actually license.  You can license
anything.  Just remember to retain your copyrights.  The media will come
and go, but content is constantly reborn, like a sponge in water.  
CD-ROMs, all the rage just a few years ago, are dead, but the news hasn't
reached the K through grade-5 publishing market.  Kids' parents have to
buy something.  Come to think of it, DVD-ROMs are actualizing the promise
of CD-ROMs.  With everything being downloaded, video tape is dead, but is
still cost-effective.  Special effects are hardly special anymore.  A 40
million dollar, mid-90's computer-animated movie can now be made for 6
million, maybe less.

The key to new media is interactivity and the basis of interactivity is
cause and effect.  Physics governs behaviour.  Click and look, click and
modify.  Register your vote.  Express yourself by selecting what you want
from a field of available options.  The real e-commerce is data-mining,
surveying and developing a user-base as an information resource.  
Exploiting the potential of selling your users' preferences and behaviour
to advertisers, marketing agencies, law enforcement officials and parents.  
People want to know what other people are thinking.

Our web-based radio station and record store produces a stream of
user-profiles in real-time.  Our users are locked in and interacting while
our data-mining clients are organizing new products and services, for all
practical purposes, in real-time.

Our data-mining operations currently focus on 24-year olds.  That's the
vein of gold in terms of demographies.  24-year olds are the trendsetters.  
We target web-literate audiences with mockumentaries or other forms of
fact and fiction hybrids.  Information as entertainment.  The news set to
music, serious music.  The major thrust of our content is the constantly
updated fantasy.  With the kiddie market this is easy.  Dinosaurs that
cohabit in a friendly manner with mammals, like us, are very popular.

The new media business continues to show downward trends in demographic
targeting.  The ultimate audience segment is the 7-year old.  The
industry's goal is to seduce, manipulate and exploit young children, and
by extension their parents.  There are pedophiliac tendencies in the new
media business sector.  They are aiming their projects, they
affectionately call their projects their 'babies,' at the kiddie market.  
They speak of noble intentions, positioning games beyond the realms of
bloody carnage, or wanting to author games for girls and grown-ups and
even seniors.  As an immediate goal, they want to open up the stockmarket
for pre-teens.

Emerging markets on the net will replace traditional markets.  Markets
decide what gets done.  Audience preferences or user profiles will
eventually be sold back to the users themselves.  Audiences will pay for
information about themselves. People need to be told what they desire,
what they need.  Afterall, they want everything but have limited
resources.  They need to know who they resemble and who they will likely
get along with.  They will need to know that they are valuable in their
own way.  I'm exploitable...I'm exploited...therefore I am.

There is a whole industry based in dressing up misshapen, unappealing,
lifeless content.  We're going to make the navigation elegant and the site
easy to use.  We're going to make it look hip, irreverent, edgy, cutting
edge...  When we get done your site will appeal to 24-year olds.

Ultimately we're talking about utility for consumers.  Transforming and
migrating content, from film and video and every other medium under the
sun, to the web, is not really the primary focus of our activity.  The
main objective is creating utility for consumers and then tracking their
behaviour while they are enjoying this utility.  The user is the content
of any new medium.

Is the non-linear, interactive architecture underpinning the content the
essential substance of the web?  In a culture of convenience, where
navigation and utility cast a shadow on content labelled as such, the
'content' is probably nothing more than a lame excuse for enjoying
navigational freedom and elegant, satisfying utility. To make an analogy,
the SUV, the sports utility vehicle, is more enjoyable itself than the
landscape it potentially violates.

Navigation is not just the utility of moving users efficiently and
effectively through content, it follows conventions and carries cultural
associations as a process.  Aesthetics are the glue between form, process
and content.  Nuances and subtle twists and turns accumulate into real
substance.  Analogies and metaphors are constantly being created in the
process of information exchange.  Why is the discussion of aesthetics
taboo when parties are trying to raise money to back a new media project?  
When will aesthetic issues be openly discussed by the new media business
community?  Afterall, people want to know what other people are thinking,
about this, and that, and the other thing..


-----------------


Note:  This text is based on notes taken at a symposium called "Money and
Law," conducted by the New Media Institute of the Banff Centre in Alberta,
Canada, July 24-26, 1999.  With all respect and sincere thanks to the
organizers and participants of this symposium, this notation is intended
to provide a somewhat problematic picture of the whole new media business
and its targeted audiences in the immediate future.

This text will be employed as a conceptual base track for an upcoming
performance work by Nerve Theory, the collaborative identity of Bernhard
Loibner and Tom Sherman.  For more information on Nerve Theory, visit the
All.Quiet website:  http://www.allquiet.org/

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