Context is the new content

Kenneth Goldsmith wrote a great post in the LA Review of Books, It’s a Mistake to Mistake Content for Content, which brilliantly explores how context is the new content. He uses some great examples to make his point, his own crusty MP3 collection, photography, Twitter and here Instagram:

The more people who use an apparatus, the more feedback the company receives about its camera, the smarter it becomes, drawing more users to its base, thereby increasing the manufacturer’s bottom line. For this reason, Instagram keeps adding new filter sets and features in order to retain and broaden its user base. To Instagram, the content of the photos people are taking is beside the point; the real point is that they keep taking them in order to fortify the apparatus.

It's really interesting to think about the sheer volume of content available to us, alongside the variety of ways we can now consume that content. Goldsmith's point that the apparatuses surrounding the artifact are more engaging than the artifact itself warrants exploring, especially with a great example around photography.

Anyone with a smartphone in their pocket is carrying a high quality stills and video camera to capture any moment whenever they want. I always used to mock the tourists who would use videocamera's (remember them?) to relentlessly capture their holiday destination from their point of view. I would say to myself that they would never revisit that material, basing it on my own laziness to fire up old videocameras to watch similar material. I remember an old friend of the family would boast how he had 'tens of hours' of DV material of the Moors. I remember just being utterly confused by it. Does that have any value at all, to even him now? Granted, content is in the eye of beholder, so perhaps it could be the perfect artefact for someone, somewhere, sometime, but I can't help feel that his fixation with his new JVC DV camera was the driving force in that marathon session of capturing those landscapes.

When visiting art galleries, you will see within minutes of arriving at an exhibit, people just nonchalantly walk up to a painting, take a photo on their phone and walk off. They almost don't want to look at it with their eyes. They want to look at it through the camera's eyes, capture it and somehow gain a sense of ownership of that painting. The work of narcissism around the relentless desire to share your highlights on social networks is at work here too no doubt.

I find it fascinating to see how people do this at 'moments' in their lives. Go to an awesome concert and only feel really gratified until you've collated 10GB's of photos and video of that gig, that after the obligatory upload to Facebook and showing your mates for a week, it remains buried - maybe until an app which gives you a 'flashback' of your photos from 12 months ago reminds you that it even happened.

I'm guilty of this though myself (to an extent!) and I think anyone who has a smartphone finds themselves falling into this habit. As Goldsmith cannily observes, Management (acquisition, distribution, archiving, filing, redundancy) is the cultural artifact’s new content.

It does feel we spend more time 'working' with our content than actually enjoying it doesn't it?

 

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Scared?

As a company moves from insurgent to incumbent, and gets big and complex and involved in lots of different things, it tends to end up with lots of different objectives, tactics and strategies. At that point, trying to understand it from outside, it can be useful to think not about what it's trying to do but what it's afraid of. This company want to do lots of things, but what's the existential threat? What does it want not to happen? What scares it, late at night?

Benedict Evans posits a really interesting way of looking at two examples of this with Apple & Google. It's a great way to get to the truth. I often hear Creative's think of the 'worst' creative idea for a brief to focus on what could be the inverse of that. 

I think we can apply this to not just large companies but small too, and maybe even ourselves.

Avengers as Art?

Matt Zoller Seitz writing for rogerebert.com

It would be silly to position Marvel or Whedon or their fan army as underdogs. Once a niche genre, superhero films are now practically the official culture of the United States, and this entry will make a fortune no matter what anyone says about it. Still, I hope that even as people buy tickets out of habit, they'll see that there is, in fact, art happening on the screen, maybe for the first time since Marvel's march through American cinema started. "Age of Ultron" proves that a movie with stealth fighter jets, levitating cities and Hulk-on-robot fisticuffs can be as freewheeling as a no-budget indie. It's a shame to think that this film will be dog-piled for its imperfections rather than applauded for trying to prove that a seemingly inflexible genre can bend into strange and surprising shapes.

A Guilty Pleasure - Ang Lee's Hulk

Really enjoyed this look back at Ang Lee’s Hulk from The Dissolve. I must admit to having a bit of a soft spot for that film, there’s a hell of a lot wrong with it, but I remember enjoying the fact it wasn’t just mindless Michael Bay style action and spent time with the characters and their respective motivations. Even though the film didn’t achieve what it set out to do (some dodgy performances, CGI which has dated (but at the time was well received) and Nick Nolte's cloud thing). I have to embrace the fact they tried. It is refreshing when usually with this type of film the closest we get to character introspection is Megan Fox’s midriff.

Even though they get so much hate now, I'm on the record for really liking the comic book style transitions. Looking at some of it with fresh eyes today, yes they are a bit OTT and scream 'Hey this is a comic book adaptation!', but there is some cool work there and as one of the posts from The Dissolve mentions, it was at a time when you could easily do this in post-production, so is an interesting reflection of filmmakers just trying stuff with available technology.

Taking comic book panels too far?

Taking comic book panels too far?

Art of the Title actually have a nice write up of the graphic treatment in the film, which is worth a read.

Bravo to The Dissolve for taking such a deep look at this film with three seperate posts, it’s a film blog for film nuts which apart from being beutifully laid out with great typography they write with great knowledge and insight on films new and old.

At my most cynical though, I would have to agree with a lot of what Honest Trailer say about Hulk…

Comparing hops to apples - How BrewDog are taking a leaf out of Apple's playbook

Since getting into craft beer last year, it’s been easy to keep an eye on what BrewDog is doing, especially when there is a BrewDog bar very close to where I live. The beers are delicious, the branding is great (since the recent re-brand) and the experience in their bars really helps pervade the idea that beer can be elevated to something way beyond Stella/Carling/Fosters.

The moment I first went into a BrewDog bar it really reminded me of going into an Apple store. Not the way it looked or the products they sold (obviously). But the approach.

Reading this article in Marketing Week today - BrewDog’s co-founder on how it matured beyond marketing stunts (Beware Paywall!), it struck me again that there is a similarity in the approach and attitude to Apple.

We’re still tiny. We’re less than 0.1% of the UK beer market. Craft beer overall is less than 1% of the beer market. For us it’s not about the size. We’ve always said to people: ‘Judge us on our beer.’ We’re selfish and we make the beers we want to drink ourselves – if we make 100,000 bottles a month or a million, it all comes back to the quality of what is in those bottles. James Watt, Co-Founder BrewDog

Without going into the well trodden exposition of how Apple works, they are a company completely and utterly focused on the quality of their product. Uncompromising some would say. But it is this focus which has brought them tremendous success. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at the now infamous (and probably most flawless) Keynote at MacWorld 2007, he said this, when talking about the mobile phone market:

Mobile phones, just about a billion last year, worldwide. So what does this tell you? What this tells you is, that 1 percent market share equals 10 million units. This is a giant market. If you just One percent market share, you’re gonna sell 10 million phones. And this is exactly what we’re gonna try to do in 2008, our first full year in the market, is grab 1 percent market share and go from there. So we’re gonna enter a very competitive market, lotta players, we think we’re gonna have the best product in the world, and we’re gonna go for it and see if we can get 1 percent market share, 10 million units in 2008, and go from there.

It’s like they’re saying the same thing. BrewDog are a much younger company than Apple, so of course they are a little more tenacious with the choice of words, (it helps get traction too!) but it’s the same thing.

You know Steve Jobs was saying much worse off camera about the competition. But it’s a fantastic strategy. Pick a massive well established market, make a product that is fundamentally better than the competition, and aim for a sliver of that market, knowing damn well that that sliver will deliver you the success you need to progress to the next level.

Time to invest in BrewDog I think.