XMediaLab Auckland brain dump

So this will be the first of a few posts about XMediaLab; in short it was very, very good! I learned a lot & came away totally buzzing if not a little exhausted… I purposefully didnt take my laptop or my stills camera and it was the right decision – more than a few people sat through each presentation continuously typing into their laptops & I got the same feeling for them as I get when traveling & I see someone experiencing the wonders before them through a viewfinder, rather than with their own eyes… It appears almost as though the concept of recording the event is more important than experiencing the event itself, but hey; some of those present may well have been journalists & the TBI twitters made for a good stash of notes to refer back to… Now I wont recount everything I experienced at XMediaLab, as if I even could, but I will just sight the presentations that resonated with me & which i think bear further investigation….

So I arrived with a moleskin notebook, a pen & my iPod Touch with initial thoughts of twittering as much as possible, but the first presenter erased any chance of that & proceeded to set a high benchmark for other presenters to follow. Of course it didn’t hurt that the clients she works with have very deep pockets, but the basic impression I got was that some of the new media she strategized & managed is highly subversive. And I mean this in a very good way. According to many self-sustaining myths genius is a singular term, but as you grow older you come to realise genius exists as a collective, albeit with a singular vision. Susan Bonds of 42 Entertainment proceeded to illustrate just how lateral you can go with rethinking old media. One concept she illustrated (labelled Augmented Reality) was based on this question: ‘In an age when most music is downloaded, how could you go about creating & releasing a concept album?’ The example she proceeded to illustrate had the audience in a state half way between awe & laughter at the audacious methods they employed in the twelve months leading up to the release. The project? Nine Inch Nails Year Zero album. I won’t repeat the lengths they went to, an outline of the project is available here and it is fascinating – but two quick examples; they decided to leak a song off the new album to start building momentum way ahead of the official release date, so how did they leak the song? They left a few USB thumb drives lieing around at a NIN concert, so for example one was found on a shelf in the toilet… Of course the first thing you would do if you found a USB drive would be to see what was on it, and of course someone at a NIN gig is going to identify it as an unreleased NIN song! But even more obliquely they had embedded an image into the spectrum of the song, the image related to a website, the address of which was embedded in T shirts sold at the concert etc etc… There is more info at Wikipedia about the ‘game’ but the potential for integration of an internet meme into the real world was beautifully illustrated by Susan on this & a number of other projects 42 Entertainment have been involved with. It was a very inspiring presentation, but I came away with one note underlined in my moleskin that bears truth no matter the scale of the project: ‘transferring ownership of the project to the audience’

Vincent Herringa of HB media & IdeaLog was up next and I really enjoyed his presentation, especially his idea of outsourcing your problems! And one of his concerns I can thoroughly relate to: the idea that a lot of new media is centred around short attention spans & instant gratification, when real depth can only really be achieved in long form. This resonated with me strongly in that I feel similarly about a lot of interactive media. People sometimes forget that the most engaging media is often achieved through the user having zero ability to change it. Film is a good example of this, it is the screenwriters & directors ‘voice’ that the audience engages with through willingly suspending their disbelief, rather than having it tricked from them via short term distractions… This wasn’t a case of ‘luddites against new media’ or anything like it, but it was a very welcome reminder of some basic truths that can sometimes be pushed aside in the rush of technological advancements…

Similarly Juliette Powell went on to remind us that the primary reason for the existence of social media is to build human relationships. This might seem self-evident but it was nice to hear someone speak about the role of community rather than just demographics & users, or ‘your own zombie army’ as one speaker put it (cringe!) I will no doubt check out her book 33 Million People in the Room – heres a short interview with her, from after XMediaLab.

The afternoon sessions moved on to focus on the business & finance side of new media development & while some of these became a little dry for my tastes, there were still a lot of interesting & very relevant ideas to consider. One term that was mentioned a number of times was the 1/9/90 rule. I have observed this phenomena plenty of times but never quite realised that it had, of course, been documented. The 1/9/90 rule basically states that in most online communities 90% of the users are lurkers/viewers who never contribute other than passively, 9% of the users contribute a little mostly via editing or commenting on existing material, while the remaining 1% account for most of action. As soon as I heard this theory, my next thought was does this not also apply to real life? 90% are consumers, 9% contribute to making other peoples work & 1% actually originate the work?

Ok, so thats a quick skim through two pages out of my moleskin… am still thinking through the other twenty I filled with fervent scribbling! I am definitely attending XMedia Lab next year & recommend it very highly! Big thanks to The Big Idea for making me aware of it and even bigger thanks to XMediaLab for organising it!