10 years ago this week I made a list of 24 mid-range predictions. The first thing that’s striking is how little has changed: Apple was about to ship the iPad in April 2010, Facebook was already a very big deal, legal marijuana was on the visible horizon, the Internet of things wasn't hard to see coming, and the 2010 football World Cup was indeed a major moment in social media (remember this?). The physical/virtual frontier remains challenging.
At the same time, Uber/Lyft wasn’t yet visible to the naked eye, nor did I mention Airbnb. Vegetable-powered pseudo-meats are exploding in popularity for environmental rather than health reasons. I noted drugs but didn't mention opioids. In energy, the news is better than almost anyone predicted as solar and wind are becoming more viable, faster than almost anyone predicted. Google remains a central player, but Microsoft's recovery from the Ballmer years is a surprise. The Kindle did well but is not conquering the world: many high-quality physical bookstores are surviving quite nicely, in part on the rebound of physical books. Elsewhere, however, streaming media have altered the entertainment landscape considerably: Netflix stock registered a 3700% return over the decade.
Lots of big issues remain problematic. Universities continue to raise tuition faster than the pace of inflation with the resulting debt load a major burden on the US economy at large, rural broadband is a joke in much of the US and elsewhere, and obesity is getting worse rather than better. Class conflict fueled by extreme concentrations of wealth is worse, gaming remains a big business (though I don't think I was alone in missing e-sports), and I didn't give nearly enough weight to YouTube and online video, whether Khan Academy, gamer channels ranging from Pew Die Pie to Twitch, or the horrific uses of the medium by terror groups and sexual criminals.
After each entry I'll add a postscript under a "grading" rubric.
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In this last week of 2009, it's scary to think that it was a full ten years ago that the IT profession was holding its collective breath as midnight January 1, 2000 approached. Apart from spooking us with memories of how fast the decade sped by, the Y2K issue stands as a cautionary tale for any technology prediction.
Duly chastened, I remain intrepid, with 24 questions for the coming decade. The alphabetical mnemonic I last used in 2005 cues up a question for each letter, minus the usual suspects.
A
Having brilliantly migrated from computers to MPs players to mobile data devices, what will Apple do for its next adjacent market? Tablet rumors surface almost weekly, Apple TV has yet to fulfill its promise, and such areas as health (iDoc?) are huge in potential. In any case, it's difficult to see Apple hitting its revenue growth numbers without an addition to the product portfolio at some point.
Grade: Near-hit: the iPad and watch helped growth, but the continually-updated iPhone and associated services have sufficed to keep Apple near the top of the industry.
B
In case you missed it, DARPA conducted a brilliant experiment last month. Ten red weather balloons were tethered in plain sight at various locations around the country, and teams competed to supply the latitude and longitude of each one using social networking technologies. MIT won in nine hours, an amazing accomplishment considering a) the continental U.S. presents a surface area of over 3,000,000 square miles and b) teams worked to spoof each other. In the end, MIT's clever compensation model to attract the widest interest group of observers helped secure the win. In light of that experiment and its many findings, the B is for business models, specifically for the plethora of social media tools that are exploding in popularity. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but this past year Facebook alone grew at a pace of 770,000 new users -- a day.
Grade: Hit, especially if you count the "sharing economy" startups that have achieved massive uptake, admittedly without much in the way of profit.
C
Here are some surprising numbers: Brazil's GDP per capita income, in constant dollars, has risen 52% in the last ten years. Singapore's is up 79%. Chile has gone up 59%. These numbers, chosen at random, illustrate the emergence of a global middle class (the C). Such groups are historically important, typically signaling political stability, economic growth, and increased presence in international trade markets. Who else will join these countries, Korea, and other fast-growing economies? How will the world change with these new entries into the economic and cultural mainstream? (For contrast, U.S. GDP per capita in 2005 dollars rose only 17% between 1998 and 2008, and class-related tensions could be big news going forward, whether in regard to labor unions, health care, the 2012 election, or unemployment.)
Grade: Hit, especially in regard to Brexit and the 2016 US election.
D
The D question relates to design. As the documentary of the same name makes clear, the "modern" presence of the Helvetica typeface (or its Ariel cousin-once-removed) is now more than 50 years old, yet it remains ubiquitous. Apple has of course capitalized on great design, and the slowdown in consumer spending in the U.S. in particular may be an indication that people are buying from a less disposable mindset. If people buy less, they may follow a generally European pattern and buy better designed items. For all of these reasons and others, the time is ripe for a design renaissance on par with streamlined toasters, or the neo-Bauhaus movement that poured so much concrete in the 1960s.
Grade: Miss. People are worried about plastic straws, which represent a whopping .025% of ocean plastic tonnage. Judging from US sales, most people don't care a lot what their car/SUV looks like. Apart from couches with cup holders and USB connections, it's hard to see much change at your neighborhood furniture store. Record covers are a dead medium enjoying a minor uptick. Overall, design doesn't seem to matter much.
D2
Drugs also merit mention. Marijuana is simultaneously a) being legalized under medical provisions in 13 states and counting, b) being decriminalized in some states, and c) contributing to political destabilization on both sides of the Mexican border. As states battle increasing social welfare and other costs in a time of declining revenues, taxing pot holds at least some appeal. In addition, mandatory sentencing laws are crowding prisons and generating hardened gang members at a staggering expense that many states simply may not be able to afford: $24,000 per year per inmate, not counting potential foregone wages and other indirect expenses. If, as The Onion memorably put it, "Drugs Win Drug War," what alternative strategies might be pursued instead?
Grade: Miss. The opioid problem is critical in many US counties, rhetoric and imagery focused south of the border to the contrary. Meanwhile, CBD is peddled as a miracle cure for almost anything.
E
As more of the world's citizens want automobiles, and electric lighting, and central heating, and meat in their diets (see C), the demand and competition for energy sources will intensify. That energy, usually provided by burning something, will in turn play into the global climate debate. Whether in oil prices, coal emissions debates, or nuclear power lobbying efforts, competition for energy will have geopolitical consequences, potentially including more armed ones.
Grade: Miss. The US fracking boom has rewritten the global flow of hydrocarbons.
F
Football (world football, not the U.S. version) will be huge news in 2010 as the World Cup is contested in South Africa. Apart from the intense fan interest in both powerhouses and upstarts, the role of mobile and new media will bear watching. Far more people own cell phones than own televisions, so the deluge of texts, Tweets, and web-hosted highlight clips could be a global coming-out party for social media, just as the 1958 NFL championship game or the JFK assassination were for television.
Grade: Hit. Social media (particularly related to fantasy) has changed the sports media landscape decisively.
G
It's difficult to think of a G bigger than Google. The question before us relates to the company's many efforts to expand its presence (and eventually its revenue base) beyond the lucrative search franchise. Will the Android mobile, or the location-based ad service, or the office applications, or some new innovation break through to profitability? How will copyright-holders react to potentially universal access to their work?
Grade: Hit. The aforementioned questions still are live 10 years later.
H
H is for housing. The economic impact of the shelter industry is of course considerable, and everybody is watching home prices for both personal and analytical reasons. Beyond sales figures, however, some larger forces are coming into play. Demographically, the baby boomers now entering retirement (or an approximation thereof) want and need different things from real estate, and it will be a while until a later wave has enough children, income, and interest to buy up the empty-nesters' housing stock. In addition, as U.S. income stagnates, the average house size will likely retreat from its high point of circa 2005.
Grade: Hit but too early: US single-family structures are only now starting to shrink, and the baby boomers are trying to sell off their historically overlarge residences to a next generation both more eco-conscious and cash-strapped. Something will have to give.
I
Identity is increasingly something people actively manage. What's your relationship status? How are you feeling today? What do you think about sports, politics, other people, your possessions? At the same time, lightweight and incredibly powerful tools lower the barriers to association. Whatever one's interests, whether obscure, weird, or outright criminal, finding like-minded individuals is now possible in ways that were simply inconceivable in physical space. As more people grow up breathing the oxygen of online, all-the-time social broadcasting, what will be the unintended consequences, the business opportunities, and the backlash?
Grade: Hit. Social media is driving identity, without question, and the reviews are mixed in terms of quality-of-life impact.
J
Building on the July letter, jobs remain at center stage. How much will this recession prove to be an interruption in the way things were, and how much will it prove to mark a shift in underlying forces of globalization, the balance of product- and services-based work, or long-term costs and benefits of modes of agriculture, consumption habits, and population pyramids? What are the odds that GM, Citibank, or Sears -- and the industries they represent -- will return to their positions of past dominance? More likely, but similarly daunting, is the question as to how entrepreneurs could possibly generate tens of millions of new jobs, on any continent.
Grade: Hit, but I didn't see Amazon becoming the behemoth it did. Meanwhile the question of "who is an employee?" being sorted out with regard to Uber in particular could just as well be phrased "what is a job?"
K
Kindlemania is in full flower, driving the publishing industry to confront some long-held assumptions. Back in May, CEO Jeff Bezos announced that Kindle sales had hit 35% of book sales when Kindle editions are available for a given title. In a matter of months, Amazon has disrupted 500 years of relatively stable technology that dated to Gutenberg. The implications will be all around us. At Princeton, for example, a trial using Kindles for textbooks was problematic insofar as page numbers (and footnotes to page numbers) needed to be rethought. Searching a textbook is useful; not being able to use sticky notes requires getting used to.
Grade: Miss.
L
Long tails make the list -- no surprise, in the age of YouTube and eBay. What's interesting is the Economist's assertion that fat tails (hit movies or blockbuster drugs) are remaining as vital as ever. The surprising conclusion appears to be that the middle market could turn out to be no-mans-land, as the Harry Potters and Transformers movies (the latest of which merely grossed over $400 million) dominate the mass market while endless, hard-to-serve niches proliferate elsewhere.
Grade: Hit. Netflix in particular must generate blockbuster hits or else their tenuous cash flow will suffer.
M
In the developing world and the OECD countries alike, mobility is not only redefining the telecom sector, as major as that may be. In addition, the notion of always being reachable, or becoming accustomed to connecting to people rather than fixed locations, is becoming commonplace so fast that we may not realize all that is happening. Worldwide, the number of cellphone subscriptions per 100 people has soared from just over five in 1998 to nearly 60 in 2008. In the midst of it, this change can be lost in fashion wars (RAZR vs. iPhone vs. Blackberry Pearl, or whatever), but eventually, in hindsight, we will see the magnitude of what we lived through.
Grade: Hit. Wireline connections for residential telephony will soon be a thing of the past in many places, and with mobile broadband, cable modems might also face a similar fate.
N
News is moving in new ways to new people. The broadcast model is augmented (not replaced) by millions of electronic conversations. The utility of owning a big antenna, a printing press, or a television studio has dropped precipitously as lightweight digital equivalents proliferate. Even though free societies need reliable news, at a time when such countries confront complex debates over everything from immigration to climate to aging to employment, the business model for news is highly unsettled. The conundrum of the need for news and the problem of organizations' being able to afford to report and provide it must be resolved, and such efforts as Google's Living Stories experiment with the NY Times and Washington Post will, I hope, spawn still more innovation.
Grade: Hit. The business model for news remains problematic, with severe consequences. The "conundrum," it's obvious, was not resolved, and democracies the world over are seeing the consequences.
O
O is for open book, shorthand for the myriad of issues relating to privacy and scrutiny. Open records, or open meetings, laws were never intended to broadcast local, paper-based information to the entire planet. At the same time, "sunshine is the best disinfectant," as Louis Brandeis so aptly put it. How and where will different people and groups trade off voluntary and involuntary exposure of private information for what perceived benefits? How will generationality play out, especially as data turned loose in one's early years may be uncomfortably or even dangerously revealing later, with different attitudes, tools, and agendas in play 10 or 20 years from now?
Grade: Hit, if only because of the Edward Snowdon discussion. I don't think we have seen the generational consequences fully unfold yet.
P
Given the speed and magnitude of the changes afoot, and given the essential characteristics of "being digital" as Nicholas Negroponte titled it, competition is playing out not just between products (Dell's PCs versus HP's or Lenovo's), it is also evolving to situate competing platforms (the P word). The choice between Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3, between an iPhone and a Nokia, or between a Chevy Volt and a Toyota Prius are more complicated than merely deciding on features and price. What are the two ecosystems -- of accessory makers, of software developers, or of product owners (and so of a current or future secondary market)? How will future innovations be incorporated into today's purchase? Will Google establish a beachhead in the browser as a quasi-operating system, on the mobile device, or in mapping? Where is Microsoft (see S)? Will still more industries begin to exhibit platform dynamics?
Grade: Hit. Whether you count Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Uber, we have seen a decade of platform-centric competition. GE under Jeff Immelt tried in vain to make a platform play. John Deere is somewhere in the middle.
R
While the phrase "real time" is not new, the advent of people-powered notification means that rather than coming from capital-intensive air-traffic control, equities trading, or medical monitoring systems, real-time data is now the product of real people. Whether in natural disasters, social movements, or just a dozen families attending an out-of-town soccer tournament, the spread of lightweight, mobile coordination mechanisms will soon make many of us wonder how we ever got along without them.
Grade: Partial hit. Waze is a good example of a success story, but much of the foreseen benefit remains ahead of us.
S
The software industry is at a crossroads: enterprise vendors still work on adjusting the mix between license and maintenance revenue, between hosted and premise-resident installations, and between consumer, middle-market, and large enterprise sectors. Software as a Service sounds great in theory, but Salesforce still has bugs to work out (regarding scale, for one thing), and the industry is still in search of other viable exemplars. In consumer markets, meanwhile, the days of CompUSA or Computer City being the dominant channels for distribution of diskettes or CDs are over: Apple's app store model has redefined developer programs and consumer software distribution essentially overnight. Open- and closed-source models are still being sorted out. With so many dimensions of the business up for grabs, who will emerge in the coming years? Who will be left behind? What further surprises still await?
Grade: Hit. Pretty much everything from mapping to enterprise managerial backbones is moving to a cloud/service model. It's getting harder and harder to "own" one's software, either applications (Adobe's Creative Suite) or data (streaming media).
T
T is for thermostats, a proxy for an entire class of inanimate objects and devices that are increasing the reach and complexity of the global network. Whether implemented for energy savings, human comfort and well-being, or security reasons, building automation joins health monitoring, security cameras, and a vast number of other devices in a quietly but rapidly growing "Internet of things." While this domain frequently lacks glamour, the possibilities for drone vehicles, for dramatic cost and energy savings, and for increased human welfare (via care-giving robots for instance) verge on the realm of science fiction.
Grade: Hit but a decade too early, most likely.
U
Whether in the U.S. or elsewhere, the place of universities is being questioned. While California's 32% tuition increase grabbed headlines and motivated nearly nostalgic building takeovers, the fact is that California education remains underpriced. The University of Texas, by comparison, has raised fees 60% in the past five years whereas California has a cumulative increase of only 20%. Such numbers appear to be unsustainable, raising the question of what will be cut when dramatic spending decisions will have to be made in the coming decade. One-time budget relief from the stimulus package is similarly unsustainable, while long-term curriculum directions scream out for reassessment. As desirable as it might be to add labor relations, African-American studies, or forensic science to the course catalog, how can universities simultaneously a) steer resources toward the future, b) respect their role as custodians of the past, and c) keep expenses under control? Classics is a frequent target for programmatic termination, but what about sociology, recreation management, or broadcast journalism? Does the U.S. need more than 200 law schools? Who decides? How? At both public and private institutions, the next decade will force tough decisions to be made.
Grade: Miss. Apart from a few closures of small liberal arts colleges and selective refocusing (closures of MBA programs and downsizing of law school classes), the great reckoning hasn't occurred yet. Meanwhile the University of Phoenix, once a glamorous harbinger of a new era, earlier this month forgave $141 million in student debt that was incurred on the basis of misrepresentations.
V
While virtualization is a widely used term of art among computer architects, my sense here is broader: Webster's Second defines virtual as "being in essence or effect, but not in fact." Not only are computing resources not resident at the point of use, neither are people for more and more tasks. Very few people could work by telephone from their homes, yet today one's physical presence and one's "essence or effect" can be many miles and time zones apart. Whether in dating, or education, or telecommuting, or elder care, we are seeing the start of a particular kind of disembodiment: just as Descartes split mind and body for the individual, will some latter-day philosopher distinguish physically co-located groups and digitally "present" assemblages?
Grade: Hit. Just walk through a college cafeteria and ask "where" people are: with the party on the screen or with the bodies at the same table?
W
Whereas in M we discussed what it means for people to be mobile, the W refers to the coming demand for wireless bandwidth. On every populated continent, we're seeing dramatic increases in mobile data and telephony. AT&T is confronting the problem of the iPhone's success as its data networks are at times showing signs of overload. Countries from Pakistan to Estonia are leapfrogging wireline infrastructure, at which they never reached mass-market penetration, and getting the majority of these country's households connected via wireless in less than a decade. By contrast, it took nearly 100 years to bring 100 million wired phones into service in the U.S., at the time a nation of 200 million. As usual, there is no free lunch, and we will be seeing radio spectrum continue to be a political hot potato. Whether in regard to suspicions (not yet confirmed) about heath issues, to spectrum auction formats, to "interference" with other activities on other frequencies, wireless demand is driving a shortage that is invisible and intangible - until the call drops or the application crashes.
Grade: Miss. The fact that Apple is reported to be building satellite access into future phones illustrates the bandwidth shortage over most of the world's land mass.
X
What is an electronic game? Despite the success of Modern Warfare ($550 million in sales in five days), console platforms such as the X-box find themselves in competition not only with each other but with unlikely channels: Electronic Arts (maker of Madden and other category-leading titles) laid off 1,500 people in November, while web-hosted low-resolution, lightweight games (often running in Flash) can command vast audiences. The Scrabble knock-off Scrabulous help drive Facebook's early growth, while more recently Farmville counts 73 million players per month. Put another way, Farmville grew to 11 million daily users in two months; World of Warcraft took four years to hit the same figure. Just as MP3 files convinced listeners to trade convenience for fidelity, perhaps the game industry will see further segmentation between low-resolution (but heavily social) Flash games and high-fidelity, computationally-intensive titles.
Grade: Miss. Not only do people continue to flock to processor-intensive game titles, an entire industry has emerged for people to watch other people play and talk about those games.
There you have it, minus entries for Q, Y, and Z (Scrabble value: 24). Additional questions of course remain, particularly in the areas of nutrition (water is a likely battleground), health (obesity, medical education, step-function gains in bureaucratic efficiency, and pharmaceutical risk/reward allocation), and aging: the time is due for an honest debate about age-65 retirement, and the role of families, villages, and societies in the care of elders.
Before any of these issues unfold further, I send my personal best wishes for a peaceful holiday and a prosperous new year. The community of readers has become virtual (see V) family over the years, and I take it as a solemn responsibility that so many of you keep reading and commenting. Thank you, and blessed holidays.
Early Indications is the weblog version of a newsletter I've been publishing since 1997. It focuses on emerging technologies and their social implications.
Monday, December 30, 2019
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Early Indications November 2019: YouTube and music
The role of online video in the music industry is vast and complex. Some labels have uploaded extensive collections of artist videos while others aggressively block any whiff of content on YouTube and elsewhere: even cover bands can be taken down, for example, even though the garage band is no threat to sales of the covered song and may actually stimulate demand for the original. The vast, low-cost distribution of online video music led to the Chicago band OK Go to sever ties with their record label in 2010, for example, and the band continues to innovate ways to garner attention (in Super Bowl commercials and video game soundtracks, among others). As the band’s website puts it,
Continuing a career that includes viral videos, New York Times op-eds, a major label split and the establishment of a DIY trans-media mini-empire, collaborations with pioneering dance companies and tech giants, animators and Muppets, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved.
The end of the need for physical distribution of plastic discs to retailers with finite shelf space serving consumers with fickle taste (making forecasting a key activity) opens up many new avenues: niche acts can find their audiences, established artists can release experimental material, and encyclopedic coverage of live sets can be practical.
Independent of the artist experimentation epitomized by OK Go and Patreon-funded efforts including Pamplamouse (crowd-funders get tutorials, behind-the-scenes interviews, early access to new releases, and other benefits), a vast segment of YouTube is devoted to old (“classic”) performances. While jazz greats, TV orchestras backing late-night hosts (including Frank Zappa playing on the Mike Douglas Show), and every niche audience imaginable can be found, the baby boomer generation is heavily represented. The role of YouTube as a collective attic for tens of millions of listener-remembers bears mention.
One important function of these communities in response to music videos is to find solidarity in nostalgia. Unlike the physical experience of a Coasters, a Rolling Stones, or a Celine Dion concert, one can connect with fellow fans in response to the richness of aural and video cues asynchronously and without any limitation on physical location. A common theme within these comments sections is to denigrate “today’s” music (defined loosely) by praising the taste, talent, and/or popularity of a bygone performer. It is also common for a younger viewer to counter the criticism either by naming names of current artists with taste or talent, or by critiquing the performance being rhapsodized.
But YouTube is far more than people watching and typing about music videos. Mashups of various kinds can express nostalgia through parody, pastiche, or other participation. Sounds connected to nostalgia may be video game soundtracks, modem handshakes, or even K-Mart in-store marketing. Furthermore, a whole sub-genre of videos has emerged that has parallels to the massively popular “unboxing” theme. Young people (generally but not always) will train the webcam on themselves and play a classic cut in an inset window on the screen. Thus a fan of, say, Stevie Ray Vaughn can see complete strangers (ostensibly) discover the greatness of the late blues guitarist. Never before could somebody watch a video, capture one’s own reaction to it, and post the meta-video for anyone on the planet to consume at his or her whim.
It is not often expressed in these terms, but YouTube utilizes cloud computing to become a cultural repository, a shared attic of memory. Independent of every other function it performs – and there are many – YouTube’s ability to hold and distribute billions of cultural memories is important but under-recognized. As John David Ebert notes, for centuries those cultural memories were bound up in print: from stone carvings on tombstones to the works of a Darwin or Curie, to be literate was to have access to the words and maybe drawings of the past. (John David Ebert, The New Media Invasion (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), p. 43.) In a heartbeat of historical time (less than five years), that changed.
YouTube’s repository of video and audio recordings marks a milestone in the history of music (among other art forms, which I will acknowledge but not discuss further here). Going back to the late 19th century, music was a key motivation for the development of the telephone: a number of books verging on science fiction envisioned a service whereby listeners could enjoy concerts without being in the hall. The performances were synchronous; the notion of sound recording succeeded the hope for simultaneous transmission by about 50 years. It is impossible to recall, but not that long ago, a person of means and cultural access might hear a given Beethoven symphony once in his or her lifetime. Shortly later, the LP record made it possible to hear a Toscanini or von Karajan performance ad infinitum.
This change in the cultural inheritance – in making music permanently available in copy form rather than only being ephemeral and synchronous – also changed music from a communal experience to a small-group or individual one. Whereas in the 19th century many communities had bands or even citizen orchestras, recording shrunk the audience from dozens or hundreds down to handfuls. Numerous illustrations from the 1950s feature a couple lounging in front of a hi-fi system; magazines from Gramophone to Audio to Playboy advised readers on matters of equipment and listening choices. National Lampoon, for a time the most-read magazine in the college demographic, served up a large helping of stereo ads in the mid-1970s to support such writers as P.J. O’Rourke, John Hughes, Doug Kenney. Later, after the iPod became popular in the early 21st century, recorded listening became solitary. What had been a ritual for decades for young soldiers and students – buying and enjoying an audio system – faded from fashion as headphones and earbuds took center stage. Receivers and speakers, once ubiquitous in a certain demographic, became niche markets. But YouTube recreates collective musical listening/reaction as an asynchronous virtual experience in contrast to people sitting in the same room.
As of 2019, YouTube is by far the largest streamer of music on the Internet. (This is not new: a 2011 “Critical Viewers Guide” to the service asserted that “Music dominates YouTube.”) It is used daily by hundreds of millions of young adults. It is primarily watched on mobile devices. Taken together, these facts begin to suggest how the service has reshaped music consumption. First, unlike some services, YouTube songs can be chosen by name. If the proper settings are chosen, the service will then auto-play a continuous soundtrack of music related to the initial selection: the algorithms have a much easier time with music than in getting other types of content to play automatically and coherently. This makes it a cousin of Napster or Grooveshark, a music streaming site shut down by the record labels in 2015. While the selection is broad and deep (including bootlegs and B-sides in some cases), it is not inclusive: a number of artists have estates or offices that take down any material associated with the act. These exceptions have not diminished the site’s popularity, and the volume of available material can satisfy most any listener, anywhere: global mass and niche markets alike are well served.
Where YouTube differs from radio or iTunes, however, is in the comment function. Listeners can post technical information (time/track listings), trivia (who was the uncredited saxophonist?), affirmations/denigrations, and memories. This annotation function means that communities can form around a song that carries special emotional weight. These communities have no intention, no formal organization, and no premeditation. As Clay Shirky noted in Here Comes Everybody, coordination goes from being an organization’s function to being a feature of the infrastructure. People can contribute as much or as little as they like, when they feel so moved, with no awareness or forethought of when other people might be listening, available, or interested.
YouTube thus replaces stereo playback systems (at the individual or small-group level), radio (in some respects), and record stores (either physical ones or Apple/Amazon) as distribution network, expert recommender, and fan club. Seeing the service only in its role as streamer (distributor) is understandable but misses what Shirky calls the “collaborative infrastructure” that provides inchoate social groups the ability to coalesce and communicate, ever so ephemerally. For all the attention rightly paid to the prodigious upload and download numbers attached to YouTube’s videos, the huge crowdsourcing effort also present on the site can get lost if one isn’t looking for it.
Consider just a few examples, chosen at random.
· A Dutch uploader found a Scopitone video (a 1960s video jukebox popular in Europe) of Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.” After some cleanup, the video has been viewed more than 100,000,000 times. The comments appear to come from many parts of the world, connecting tens of thousands of people (30,000 comments) who will never cross physical paths and few of whom were alive when the song was on the radio.
· About the same year, Atlantic Records released the dance tune “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells (of Houston, Texas). The song, viewed nearly 8 million times, remains infectious and original. Here, the comments tell a different story. Pop Dada wrote
archie , I was in nam in 68 ... one night we was dancing to tighten up .. some of the guys..next day we lost 4 of my squad ..ambush .. we fought all day and night.. but I always remember that night and day .. one minute we were back in the world ,, hours later some of us had left it behind and died at 20..i didn't know I had ptsd till maybe 15 yrs later .. I was driving with my wife and "tighten up" came on the radio ... all of a sudden I thought of that night . the guys dancing then losing them the next day and my eyes swelled up with tears because the memory of them was so strong .. we were with Charlie co. 2/506th 101st Airborne Div. we were the 1st Platoon. thanks man your song carries a lot of weight with me brother.. ... you got hit too.. yea man me too.
More than 100 people wrote back with affirmations, sympathy, and thanks for his military service.
· Aretha Franklin, a force of nature in any medium, is a powerful figure on YouTube, with multiple videos getting 10 million+ views. One stands out as a kind of landmark. In 2015 she performed “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors performance, paying tribute to the song’s co-writer Carole King, one of the night’s honorees. The TV special was viewed by 7.5 million viewers, who saw Franklin deliver a stunning performance; King herself was clearly moved by the 73-year-old’s rendition. In only four years, YouTube viewers have seen the performance roughly 33 million times, highlighting the importance of the service for broadcast-like reach as well as effectively infinite selection.
· Sakamichi no Apollon (Kids on the Slope) is a Japanese anime that aired in 2012. Jazz specifically and music generally are a central force in the storyline, based on a prize-winning manga of the same name. In one episode, one of the aforementioned kids is playing Art Blakey’s jazz standard “Moanin’” on an organ in an empty church. The young priest silently enters and joins him on drums in a skilled, emotionally rich improvisation. The clip is of course available on YouTube, as is the Blakey original, and the respective comment threads tell the story of bidirectional trans-Pacific cultural transmission. Each video has more than a million views, and there are clearly people being introduced to entirely new art forms in a way no other medium could have facilitated.
This participation in the preservation, propagation, and repetition of past musical performances and styles is also important in the context of the history of popular music. Between the late 1990s and possibly until the present day, public performance of music (live and via electronic distribution) has been dominated by aging rockers, established country acts, and a handful of hip-hop superstars who have become the dominant face of their genre. Nothing in genre terms has broken through the way rock and roll did in the 1950s, hard bop jazz did in the late 1950s/early 1960s, acid rock did in the 1960s, punk did in the ‘70s, or hip-hop did in the ‘80s. That’s upwards of 35 years in western culture without a major shift in musical direction, maybe slightly less if electronica/techno/rave is counted as major.
Rather than innovations in musical style, the 20+ years of music on the Internet have been characterized by technological innovation. The late 1990s initially saw MP3 file sharing through Napster, which then evolved into BitTorrent (and its grey-area variants) plus legal services including Apple’s iTunes and Amazon Music. More recently, the notion of a music “file” has been eclipsed by streaming media, including of course YouTube, which delivers more online music than any other service. (It also pays by far the lowest royalties: 49% of overall streams provided only 7% of royalty payments.) The innovations have been far more in the technologies of distribution and consumption (those earbuds) than in any artistic realm.
This technological facilitation of nostalgia serves many social functions beyond the individual frissons of memory. People can bond over shared tastes or memories, they can feel and assert a sense of meaning (many Vietnam veterans recall where they were and who they were with when certain songs were playing), and people situate themselves (and identify with others) with temporal anchors: I was X years old in Y school when that song came out, possibly driving a Z car.
This is but one corner of one “neighborhood” on YouTube. The service has reinvented other domains, whether education (particularly via Sal Khan’s tutorials that became Khan Academy and helped “flip the classroom”), beauty and cosmetics through a new class of influencers, and extremist groups that recruit on the platform. While it is impossible to map the terrain of YouTube, it is important to begin to appreciate the magnitude of the changes it is introducing.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Early Indications October 2019: Reflections on TED talks
It’s impossible to discuss online video without noting the evolution of the TED conference. As of 2017 TED talks had been viewed more than 2 billion times, an extraordinary count given that the talks can be on such cognitively challenging topics as astrophysics, clinical depression, and redesigning education. The origins go back to 1984, when the first conference on the convergence of technology, entertainment, and design was held, co-hosted by graphic designer Harry Marks and architect Richard Saul Wurman. Demos of the Apple Macintosh and Sony/Philips compact disc along with talks from early digerati Stewart Brand and Nicholas Negroponte (along with the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot) set the tone for later meetings. The event was financially unsuccessful and six years passed until TED2.
From 1990 until 2009, the conference was held annually in Monterey, California and quickly became an exclusive event with celebrity attendees from many fields: speakers have included Bono and Bill Clinton, Billy Graham and Richard Dawkins, Sergey Brin and Jane Goodall. Intellectual eclecticism combined with A-list star power to make TED a coveted invitation. Wurman sold the event in 2000 to the British magazine publisher Chris Anderson (no relation to the Wired editor Chris Anderson of “Long Tail” fame).
Anderson changed TED’s direction. Ownership was transferred to the non-profit Sapling foundation, the conference moved from Monterey to Long Beach then Vancouver, and speaker talks were posted for free viewing in 2006. By January 2007 44 talks had been posted, amassing 3 million views. In April of that year TED.com was relaunched to highlight video talks, and by 2011, TED was licensing the conference format (including its rigidly timed and tightly rehearsed 18-minute format for speakers, regardless of their pedigree) to hundreds of TEDx spinoffs. What Anderson called “radical openness” paradoxically made the physical conferences even more desirable and the admission price soared from $4400 in 2006 to $10,000 in 2018. Spinouts include TEDMED, TEDWomen, TED Global, and TED Youth.
As Anderson said in 2012,
It used to be 800 people getting together once a year; now it's about a million people a day watching TED Talks online. When we first put up a few of the talks as an experiment, we got such impassioned responses that we decided to flip the organization on its head and think of ourselves not so much as a conference but as "ideas worth spreading," building a big website around it. The conference is still the engine, but the website is the amplifier that takes the ideas to the world.[i]
TED talks have evolved as a distinct genre. The coaching and time clock impose a certain homogeneity on the talks, but global intellectual superstars have emerged from unexpected directions. They include:
Ken Robinson
Robinson was born in Liverpool, England and, in contrast to his brother (a professional soccer player) had to attend special schools on account of aftereffects of polio. His PhD from the University of London focused on the uses of drama and theater in education, and this degree led to a career in arts education. He has developed into a sharp critic of many educational practices and his TED talks, viewed tens of millions of times, stress the role of schools in encouraging – or more often killing – creativity in students.
Brené Brown
Brown was born in San Antonio, Texas, raised for a time in New Orleans, and has spent her adult life in Houston as a practitioner and later professor of social work. Her work focuses on leadership, particularly the role of vulnerability. She has written five #1 New York Times best-sellers and her 2012 TED talk is one of the top five most-viewed TED videos of all time.
Hans Rosling
Rosling was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1948, the same town where he died 68 years later. In between, however, he lived in India, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, working as a physician and public health investigator. His TED fame comes from his many talks on global health and economic development. His compelling use of attention-getting devices in the service of helping attack ignorance make his talks exemplary. In one video, he launches the Trendalyzer software built by his son Ola which presents United Nations data in compelling visuals. Google bought the software and now makes it publicly available at Gapminder.org, the website devoted to the foundation launched by Rosling and his children. In a different video, Rosling exhibits his skill as a sword-swallower, and in another, deploys plastic Ikea bins to illustrate potential paths to a nine-billion-person planet.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie was born in Nigeria, studied medicine and pharmacy in her native country, then began college at Drexel before moving to be closer to her older sister and completing a bachelor’s degree at Eastern Connecticut State University. Master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins and Yale followed soon thereafter. She was awarded a MacArthur fellowship the same year she earned her Yale masters in African studies. A year later she delivered her TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which has been viewed nearly 20 million times as of 2019. A later TEDx talk, “We should all be feminists,” was sampled in a Beyoncé song.
These four individuals illustrate several aspects of the TED universe. Previously unknown experts in a particular geographic or intellectual area can transcend boundaries with global exposure that crosses traditional disciplinary lines. Note that traditional U.S. academics don’t attract massive viewership, except in a few cases (positive psychology as researched by Martin Seligman, Dan Gilbert, and Shawn Achor being one).
There are many critiques, and most hit the mark. Even including some of the superstars listed above, the talks can feel massively over-rehearsed, and the staging can make even minor insights and anecdotes come across as profound. The British political activist Julie Bindel notes that “The talks are so rehearsed that even the well-placed pauses and casual hair flicks look hideously false. TED-bots strut around the stage, posing, delivering well-crafted smiles and frowns. It’s like amateur dramatics for would-be intellectuals.”[ii] The cognitive authority of the speakers vary. Some are the genuine article, a truly original and rigorous thinker. Often, however, the featured points of view come courtesy of self-described “thought leaders” who convey a large portion of form and little substance; Houman Harouni, writing in The American Reader, succinctly nailed this point: “TED’s is the language and tone of the pitch.”[iii] Finally, the TED stage has become a kind of church, one where Ideas are Good and can make Good Things happen. The New Statesman’s Martin Robbins noted in 2012 that “’Ideas worth spreading’ sounds more like the slogan of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”[iv]
Statistically, the talks (as of 2017) skew heavily white and heavily male. The expected power law applies: despite there being more than 2,000 talks, the top 25 account for more than a quarter of all views. The most viewed profession is author, lending credibility to the critique of TED as a book-flogging exercise. Among nationalities, the U.S. dominates with 467 talks between 2001 and 2017. That’s four times as many as the U.K. in second with 113, which in turn is three times as many as India, with 41 in third. Canada, Israel, Australia, and France follow in low double digits, with Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Italy rounding out the top ten, all in single digits. The average female speaker is about 45 years of age, whereas men are typically about 49.
The top ten topics, as measured by views, are as follows (numbers are rounded to the nearest million):
- Communication 2242
- Technology 1973
- Health 1474
- Art 1195
- Happiness 1096
- Education 987
- Creativity 978
- Motivation 869
- Design 6210
- Politics 58
Equally enlightening are the bottom ten categories, again with views rounded to the nearest million:
- Film .32
- Anthropology .43
- Peace 1.14
- Military 1.25
- Physics 1.26
- Disability 1.27
- Philanthropy 1.28
- Terrorism 1.39
- Privacy 1.510
- Society 1.5
Thus it’s easy to form a stereotype of a male US author talking on communications or technology. Big, complex topics (war and peace being ready examples) don’t attract large audiences whereas gadgets and inventions do. Generally uplifting topics – art, happiness, creativity, motivation – all see lots of views.
Benjamin Bratton is a professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. His TEDx talk (this did not happen on the big stage, for obvious reasons) was about TED, and he critiqued three aspects. First, Bratton highlighted the oversimplification of complex ideas to fit into a time window and for an audience that doesn’t engage with nuance. Summing up this point, he delivers a perfect TED soundbite: “I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster.” The problem is that Chris Anderson never proposed such a venture: the straw man argument Bratton utilizes is exactly what he criticizes.
Second, and on much firmer ground, Bratton gets to the core of TED: its neospirituality. “I Think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment,” he says. “The key rhetorical device for TED talks is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony (an "epiphimony" if you like) through which the speaker shares a personal journey of insight and realization, its triumphs and tribulations.” What Bratton calls “placebo politics” oversimplifies complex problems, offers a personal testimony of hope, and ultimately leaves listeners thinking something has been conquered when in fact the intervention likely made things worse. The quasi-religious backdrop of hopeful optimism informs much of the TED narrative, leading to the third critique.
Technology, the T in TED, is in Bratton’s view accentuating and amplifying the flaws in underlying social relationships rather than exposing and correcting them. The techno-utopian thread in TED talks ebbs and flows, but it is always present, if only in the speaker’s knowing relation to the video camera. (I say this as a one-time TEDx speaker.) A better E, he continues, would be “economics” because all economic systems promise one thing and deliver something very different. Finally, D – Design – is where those technologies are realized in actual human contexts: “the potential for [phones, drones, and genomes (what we do here in San Diego and La Jolla)] are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, and to make good futures, design as ‘innovation’ just isn’t a strong enough idea by itself.”
Bratton ends by breaking the unspoken TED talk closing: he’s not personal, not hopeful, and not exhortatory. Rather than wrapping up the idea with a bow, he expands it into multiple dimensions.
I don't have one simple take away, one magic idea. That's kind of the point. . . . [I]t's not as though there is a shortage of topics for serious discussion. . . . Problems are not "puzzles" to be solved. That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, they just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed. It's not true.
"Innovation" defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo. One TED speaker said recently, "If you remove this boundary ... the only boundary left is our imagination." Wrong.
If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.
Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration," it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualization: the hard stuff that really changes how we think. More Copernicus, less Tony Robbins.[v]
In the six years since that critique, it feels as though TED's moment at the center of the zeitgeist has passed. Civilized discourse at elevated levels of conceptual complexity is out of fashion, even (especially?) at the middlebrow tier. The world's population of superstar TED-type speakers is finite, and perhaps it's been relatively thoroughly mined out. Be that as it may, the dawn of online video brought the world its own equivalent of the Chautauqua movement, a healthy portion of uplift and cognitive exercise unable to sustain itself over time, albeit without the picturesque scenery.*****
[ii] Julie Bindel, “Why I’d never do a TED
talk,” The Guardian 23 July 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/23/ted-talk-smugness-presenters-embarrassing
[iii] Houman Harouni, “The Sound of TED: A
Case for Distaste,” The American Reader no date https://www.newstatesman.com/martin-robbins/2012/09/trouble-ted-talks
[iv] Martin Robbins, “The trouble with TED
talks,” New Statesman 10 September 2012. https://www.newstatesman.com/martin-robbins/2012/09/trouble-ted-talks
[v] Benjamin Bratton, “We need to talk
about TED,” The Gurdian 30 December 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted