Just got back from experiencing a particularly unpleasant, ugly and amoral Hollywood movie.
Whilst in eyes-closed Zen-like meditative mood half-way through, I joined a few dots in my brain. Here’s a few not-so-random quotes from around the blogosphere:
Abundance has brought beautiful things to our lives, but that bevy of material goods has not necessarily made us happier. The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven’t budged. That’s why more people – liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it – are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning.
— Daniel Pink via Evelyn Rodriguez.
Live to Work and Work to Live
The social context of the relationship between workers and employers will shift from a livelihood basis to one that focuses on enhancing the quality of life for the individual. This trend will cause a broad redefinition of the implied social contract between individuals and organizations that has been relatively unchanged for over a century.
Microsoft should be trying to make it easier to use their technologies and to find new applications. Instead they are acting as if it is more important to limit the customers choices in order to preserve the obscellescent business model of Tellywood.
— Bob Frankston summarising Microsoft vs Customers and Itself.
Where’s the link? Well, let’s start from the beginning again.
I found the movie offended my inner values. It’s not the casual violence, the bad dialogue, the gloss. It was the lack of a core thing of beauty, of humanity — or the knowing negation or absence of such to highlight its true value. After all, there have been extremely good previous movies about professional assassins whose characters were violent and immoral, but where the director’s message was profoundly moral and human. This movie wasn’t nihilistic, it was just of no value.
I’m not well-read when it comes to media gurus, so I may be retreading over ground that greater minds have already mapped. But my feeling is that media and communications experiences can be broadly defined against two categories: cathartic and confirmatory.
Cathartic experiences are about escapism. They numb you to your real life. Playing hours of Tetris does this. Watching junk TV. You know the story. This movie was definitely cathartic.
Confirmatory experiences revive your sense of being. They don’t hide reality, they re-inforce it. They confirm your humanity. If you find a movie about killing depressing, it’s because it is depressing.
Confirmatory experiences appear to my eye to contribute to a search for meaning and purpose in life, and to help fulfil a desire for transcendence. We’re intensely social creatures, and the most intense confirmatory experiences tend to replicate the “tribal fireplace gathering” model — we talk, we eat, we gaze at the stars, we wonder, we hope for tomorrow.
Some media can follow a dual role between catharsis and confirmation. Watching a TV program along with millions of fellow simultaneous viewers may initially be cathartic, but the shared experience and next-day office chat is confirmatory. Playing Doom all day is cathartic; a sophisticated Warcraft avatar working in collaboration with other people towards shared goals is at least partly confirmatory. It’s like taking a drug to give you a different perspective on reality — separation of ego from your physical self and implantation into another body.
This stuff matters in the business world, even if we hate speaking in these terms. Billions and billions of dollars are being spent on networks and services that transform the mediascape. Broadcast TV fades in importance; “Me-TV” rises. Tools like Skype allow for new forms of social interaction, such as the family conference call.
I can’t beat Hugh Macleod’s eternal wisdom here:
THE MARKET FOR SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN IS INFINITE.
People by their actions are showing an inclination for more human, meaningful, indeed spiritual experiences. And it’s no contradiction in them paying to get them at times. The market for confirmatory experiences appears to be growing faster than that for cathartic ones. Or at the very least, you need to know your market and adjust your product accordingly. Just because you supply “tele-vision” doesn’t mean you’re at all delivering the same confirmatory experience via on-demand IPTV as you did on broadcast.
I don’t think the designers of these new media products have given much thought to the deeper needs of their customers. It’s still almost impossible to, say, virtually meet up with other people after a TV show that you found exceptionally good (or objectionable) and create a confirmatory experience out of it. If communities dominate brands is true, it’s saddening to see how few media companies make community formation an easy and rewarding experience.
I guess this is all old news to Cluetrainers, although perhaps they drew their scope too narrowly; it’s not just markets that are conversations, it’s the whole of life. And judging by today’s experience — to uses Bob’s phraseology — Tellywood’s cathartic product isn’t just an obsolete business model. It’s an obsolete business.
UPDATE: Want more evidence? Biggest blockbusters of recent years: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix. Common thread? A quest for meaning in each one.
UPDATE: One last thoughht. Cinemas don’t make money — just enough to survive. The one we went to is part of a big mall complex. Footfall through the shops is what counts. Lessons for other media distribution methods?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:35 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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