It’s a jungle out there

I’m finding it difficult to articulate what I’m thinking about My Tribe, Pool and SMP these days. At the start of semester, all of these things felt clearly alien. But now after so many weeks of acclimatisation, I can’t remember what “regular media” was, as opposed to this new “social/online/sophisticated media”. Why does this course feel so different to what I expected coming out of TV1 and TV2? Last year I made “self-contained media objects” — short films. And in my mind, the objective was simple: make a *good* short film that will look good on my showreel and generally impress people. Simple.. easy. That was last year. Now, in PP1, the rules all change. Media objects are now non-linear, hypertextual, existing as fragmented nodes in a larger network. It’s no longer easy to say “this is my film, and this is the start of it, this is the end of it”. In this way, working on a site called “Pool” is strangely fitting — today’s media works are.. messy. they all bleed together and I’m no longer sure which person is responsible for what. Media works accrue comments, and collections of comments can in themselves be seen as media artifacts.
Why do these spaces exist, and why do people feel compelled to use them? For many people, the drive to create something is a compulsion in itself — the uploading of media work is arguably subordinate to this initial drive. But from what I’ve seen on Pool, other sorts of motivations exist. Some people, having realised that ABC Pool is more than a simple viewing platform, have harnessed the networked-ness of online media in order to spread a particular social message or moral imperative. For instance, one Pool user contributed works that all centred around the experiences of refugees. One of these contributions, an eerie soundscape featuring gunfire in in forest at night, seemed like an attempt to make Pool users understand the psychological and phenomenological experience of being in a refugee’s situation. This sort of media work can only serve this purpose in an online, multimedia space such as Pool. Media contributions intended as morally confronting cannot function unless they are distributed. Further to this, Pool allows for the user to upload a variety of different media forms — in this case, while we may all understand what a refugee is, listening to an audio piece may force us to understand the concept on a deeper, more personal level.

Case studies aside, I have found that ABC Pool, and by extension My Tribe, is host to greater amounts of political, social and personal accounts of the real world than is common on YouTube or Vimeo. To some extent, this may because of the user demographic, and also because Pool is an Australian website — Australian users can voice their opinions on national issues that would be lost on international audiences. I also suspect that Pool’s connection to ABC encourages discussion of social issues of national importance rather than uploads of teen skating videos or whatever else is up on YouTube.

This is all great, but how do I use these observations in some sort of constructive fashion? I think the answer lies in rethinking our conception of online spaces. Many people make a self-contained media object and want to “showcase” it on the internet. For these people, websites such as Pool provide their audience with an interface through which the films can be consumed. It’s that simple. But this description of Pool as just a “viewing platform” is profoundly empty… there is a great deal of life and interaction on Pool — political discussions, constructive criticism, almost affectionate interactions between users of the opposite sex… Pool is not merely an online showcase. Its users are driven by all sorts of different motivations and their reasons for creating material vary dramatically. Thus as media makers, we must come to grips with the fact that making online content entails more than simply compressing and uploading a self-contained film. Our audience literally has the world at their fingertips, and it is naive and almost selfish to assume that users will be captivated by media content that was swiftly uploaded to the web without anyone considering the needs of an online audience.

All happening

So I’m running the facebook page with Stevie. I’m cutting our massive Simon Brown saga. I’m surfing Pool to find content for the facebook page. And now I’m blogging about it. It’s all happening.

First up: Facebook.
I’ll admit, this sudden responsibility took me by surprise.. I had no clearly defined strategy.. but I’m developing an SMP-philosophy as I go. I think that ultimately, the purpose of this facebook group is to provide a centralised point of communications that all My Tribe / Pool users have access to. It’s a place in which users can talk back to producers, and somewhere to make people aware of new and upcoming developments related to My Tribe. So… I think it’s most important to monitor ABC Pool closely, and harness the creative value of works on Pool in order to attract people to My Tribe. In my mind, there’s not much point in trying to make the Facebook page a source of entertainment in itself. It’s a linking point.. the comms centre. Hence I try to make all posts relate back to specific works uploaded as part of My Tribe. This strategy serves a dual purpose — it attracts people to Pool, but it also serves as a form of encouragement and social stimulation for the content creator, assuming he or she is aware that the work is highlighted on the Facebook page.
I’ll admit that while this Facebook strategy may be ideologically sound, it’s not the most stunning system I’ve come across. Several previous FB admins have come up with clearly defined systems to employ, and the number of My Tribe fans has skyrocketed. But we (me and Stevie) are in a difficult position — My Tribe is already public, it’s already developed a userbase, it’s “matured” and its growth rate will no longer be as exponential as it was to start with (unless we start running a $10,000 My Tribe lottery or something). Although we can still “recruit” new people, I think we’ve definitely shifted gears by now and the emphasis is upon sustaining popularity and encouraging more activity from the members we’ve got already. This may mean that our facebook stats are.. not as shiningly glorious as they have been in other weeks, but this phase of the process is just as important.

On to Simon Brown:
So we’ve got a rough cut together, and the piece runs just under 10 minutes. Wow. I knew it was too big, but I never expected it to be quite that big. Obviously, this is a rough cut and there’s plenty of fat to cut out of our project. But even with a massive cut, we’re still probably looking at a video piece that runs for 7 minutes.. and on the internet, that’s a long time. It’s a bit naive to expect people to sit and watch our film for 7 minutes when a vast world of social networking sites, msn and porn awaits. Simon Brown can’t compete with all of that. But we’ve got a few options. One is to cut the hell out of the narrative and transform our sections of “flab” into “extra online content” to be uploaded onto the blog and / or linked to from facebook. The other option that we’ve been considering is to cut down the film to some extent, and then divide it up into three separate chapters. Now, I realise, dividing it up into chapters does nothing to help shorten the length of our film. It’ll still be 7 minutes. But if we upload it in discrete chunks, it becomes psychologically easier for the viewer to consume all of this content. Looking over the script, breaking it down into segments should be fairly painless, as there are definite “parts” to the story that have their own beginning, middle and end of sorts. But in any case, we’ll see how that goes next time we’re editing.

And finally, Pool and SMP:
Currently, I’m learning by doing. I’m concentrating on my role as a Facebook person until the end of the week as I think it feeds into my observations about online social networks and gives me a good sense of what “works” and what doesn’t. After this week I can take my assorted Facebook learnings and couple them with a breakdown of the Pool population… why are people contributing? Why are people compelled to comment, and what sort of works attract comments? etc etc. I’ll get there in the end, now that I know what I need to be doing.

I think that’s it (minus PP2 preparation. but that’s another story).

No one can hear you scream

At times, this internet feels like a vacuum. Anything is possible, and this freedom feels like nothingness. I can communicate with anyone, track down whoever I want, upload whatever I want.. create huge and abstract online spaces for all to see. But I don’t.
The internet can be cold and lonely and monotonous… but what disturbs me most is the apparent lack of purpose to it all. Millions upon millions of pages.. so much text, so many pixels, bytes and bits. But why? What compels me to cast my creations out into this digital chasm? Why do I write in this text box, and not in a physical diary?
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that there is no definite *reason* for putting our works online. Maybe it’s nice to think that someone out there is watching.. to get an occasional comment, etc. But because there is no definite *purpose* to content creation, because it’s something that people “just do”, it becomes extremely hard to evaluate or give feedback on what people put online. Yes, your poetry piece *could* have used more visual metaphors, that might have been nice.. but why does it matter? Ultimately, you’ve had a moment of inspiration and regurgitated your creativity into the great vat of Pool. And that’s all you needed to do. Your works are personal, the value of your works are subjective. Whatever I can say about your work is immaterial because *the work itself does not matter*. It’s not about your creations, it’s about going through the motions of *creating*. What can I say about any work, in light of this?

Yes. I’m being defeatist. Yes. I do like receiving comments from people, and I’m sure that others would also appreciate receiving comments, and this would stimulate activity on Pool. But I’m stuck in a vicious cycle where my comments are all necessarily meaningless, and so I cannot think of comments, and so I cannot encourage great torrents of activity on Pool. Also.. how do I quantify the impact of my comments? My comments may have inspired someone into an online creative frenzy, and I may never know.

So many paradoxes. So little time.

Motivations online

I think there’s something vaguely paradoxical or problematic about ABC Pool’s scheme. As I understand it, this project is designed to generate a wealth of creative self-expression online and attract a stimulated audience of engaged consumers and produsers. The interactivity allows for Pool to grow by itself and become exponentially popular, thus ABC has an online farm of creative content to harvest in the coming months.

There’s no real problem with what I’ve outlined above. I think that Pool has already achieved something like this. It’s got a small group of content producers and consumers, and this community functions on its own for the most part. The *problem*, as I see it, comes into play when we attempt to expand Pool, to switch Pool into hyperdrive. We need more people making content (specifically for “my tribe”) and more people browsing content (specifically for “my tribe”). But realistically, your average Joe wouldn’t go near Pool if his life depended on it.

Why do people go online? What do they want to do with themselves once they’ve clicked the “Firefox” button?

I’m going to make some sweeping answers to this question. Sweeping, but correct in many cases I would argue.

For many people, the internet seems to function as a social tool. It’s not particularly exciting, no one particularly *enjoys* the Facebook website — but the enjoy interacting with their friends *via* facebook. Similarly, hotmail, gmail and other email sites serve a similar function. Theyr’e tools that facilitate communication between people. Simple, generally text-based communication.

People also enjoy talking about themselves.. what they’re currently doing or thinking about. The popularity of Twitter, a fairly basic website when you think about it, demonstrates this urge. It’s very simple, very effective.

So.. I’d argue that generally, our collective addiction to being online is primarily driven by this urge to communicate with friends and keep up to date with what’s happening in your social circle.

And this is not what Pool is about. Pool is about making a product. A *thing*. Something creative. A poem or a podcast or a still photo, etc. And now you’re talking about a smaller subset of people online. These people like making things, playing with media and throwing it onto the web for the world to see. Most are not out to become media producers in any professional sense, they simply like making things, putting their ideas online and potentially getting feedback and validation from people all over the world.
That’s great. I like the idea that people out there are taking initiative and making all sorts of media for their own enjoyment and not much else. The problem is, if these people want feedback or validation, they typically want to place their work somewhere with a large body of users, a mass-audience. This “place” is currently not Pool. Similarly, online media *consumers* generally gravitate towards places with a massive archive of content to browse through. This place is also not Pool.

So… Pool needs to target a subset of the community that *already have* what they’re craving. I’d argue that most people with this urge to create media, or to consume sophisticated media content, are already doing so, and are already satisfied with what they get.
So… what are we doing to attract people to Pool and “My Tribe”? Well, paradoxically, it seems that we’re *limiting people’s creative freedom* by giving them a theme to work with. Now… I’m used to addressing themes. I’ve had to do that throughout my media course. But initially, when you’re given a theme, you think “shit, really? that’s hard, why do we have to have that theme?” And then, after much brainstorming, and after several tutorial sessions with Christine, you come up with a good idea and become enthused with your project. The problem is, on the web, people have short attention spans. The entire world is at the tip of their fingers, and I’d argue that no one has the patience to work with some other person’s designated “theme” unless there’s an incentive.

I’m sure that some people will enjoy my tribe. There are a lot of people in this world, and we’ll get some people interested in Pool, no doubt. But I know that if I were in the consumer’s shoes, I’d be thinking “Hey look, I can use Pool to upload lots of my awesome media, and it’ll be really cool. Oh… wait.. a theme? my tribe? hah. no way. I’m going back to Youtube where I can put up whatever the hell I want.”

sad but true I think.