The Future of Content Belongs to All of Us
We begin with the lyrics to a very clever “Eleanor Rigby” parody…
“Dog in a trenchcoat
Getting promoted at work but then sheds his disguise
Canine surprise
Boss of the office
Looks at the dog and then nods when he sees what he did
He is three kids
All the phony people
Where do they all come from?
All the phony people
Where do they all belong?
Henry the intern
Looks at the dog and the children and takes off his coat
He is a goat
Young secretary
Secretly hoping that nobody working can see
She’s made of bees
All the phony people
Where do they all come from?
All the phony people
Where do they all belong?
Michael from HR
Typing a memo to people he knows are not real
He is a seal
Dog out of trenchcoat
Happily sharing the news of his raise on the phone
Chewing a bone
All the phony people
Where do they all come from?
All the phony people
Where do they all belong?”
Now if I were to ask you how this song was written, you’d probably say, “Someone sat down and wrote it.” And I’d say, “You’re half-right. Actually 1/4 right. Cos four people wrote this song.”
This song began life as a tweet. One verse. Then someone else picked up on the thread. Then it jumped social media channels to Tumblr where two more folks filled out the thread. To see what the construction of this song truly looks like, see below.
And then someone actually recorded it.
The first post not only presented the idea, but it also implicitly showed the rules of the game. “Use this rhyme scheme from this song. The theme is animals dressed up like people.” Even if it wasn’t intended to be a game others decided to and were able to play along. The content was generated not from a single mind but from a single idea that others could adapt and play with.
Welcome to participatory culture.
For most of the 20th Century, content was like this…
A flowing river of water from a specialized, segregated source that would be opened occasionally and then shut off and the person running it would say, “Do not become addicted to content. You will resent its absence.”
This is what content looks like now…
A neural net. Many different “nodes” of content creators. Each node represents both creator and content and consumer because they’re all in the mix consuming content, creating content about the content they’ve consumed, creating content about that content, using content to communicate about that content, and so on and so on.
For another example, look no further than our dear, departed Vine. Once, someone created a vine of themselves singing. Then someone created a vine of themselves adding piano to that singing. Then someone created a vine of themselves adding trumpet to the vine of the piano added to the singing. This type of Vine inception happened all the time.
None of these people knew each other. None of these people asked permission. They were guided by a hashtag but that’s about all the guidance they needed. They just did it and collaboratively yet independently created something that did not exist before. Participatory culture.
And there are many different “forks” off of that initial Vine.
This can happen from the top down as well. When Last Week Tonight wanted to draw attention to the fact that cameras were not allowed at Supreme Court hearings, they came up with a simple solution. They filmed footage of dogs in judge’s robes each representing a different Justice. Then they released that footage, along with audio of the hearings, so the audience could assemble their own videos of Supreme Court hearings and they did. In droves. And now we have, arguably, the only video of Supreme Court hearings in US history.
Here is the actual footage they provided.
And here is an actual slice of an actual Supreme Court debate as rendered by dogs (as put together by an actual viewer using the above footage).
But top down or bottom up, the difference here is content in which you participate and that comes about from participation.
But this is nothing new. There is at least one group for whom this approach to content is old hat. Which brings me to my number one piece of advice for content strategists.
Study fan culture.
Fans have been doing the participatory culture thing for a while now. They’ve been ahead of the curve on how we will consume and produce content in the future.
For just a small example of what fans can do when motivated, check out a talk by Maciej Ceglowski called “Fan Is a Tool Using Animal”. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but the tl;dr is something like this:
Delicio.us is created and fans flock to it to create a directory for fan fic. Delicio.us gets bought by Yahoo and much of the functionality that makes it a great directory gets stripped out. Ceglowski, in the midst of creating Pinboard, offers up his fledgling platform as a means to recreate that directory elsewhere. He invites fans to hit him up on Twitter to request specific bits of functionality that will make it a good home for this directory. The tweets come so thick and fast that Twitter is no longer a good repository, so he recommends they collaborate in a Google doc. And boy howdy they do…
Pages and pages and pages that are, themselves, their own directory with tagging, flagging, and systems of recognizing previously addressed issues and where to find them to the point where even as Ceglowski was writing about how a particular feature might be too hard to implement someone else wrote in saying “fixed it”.
All of this was the collaboration of people who weren’t being paid, maybe didn’t know each other, but were all motivated to create content about content they loved and even collaborate on the platforms to catalog and find the content about the content they loved. They built things together.
Fan culture was doing this long before we had Github.
If you want a primer in how participatory culture works, read your Henry Jenkins. Start with Convergence Culture then move on to Spreadable Media. Jenkins came to fame with observations about how the way we consumed media was changing. An early example he gives is the critical and fan reaction to season two of Twin Peaks. Both fans and critics hated it, but for different reasons.
Critics hated it because they claimed it had gotten too complicated. Fans hated it because…wait for it…it had gotten too simple. Critics and fans were watching it in completely different ways. Critics were watching it alone, one by one. Fans were watching it collaboratively. As soon as an episode was over, they could go to message boards and discuss what just happened and how it tied in to theories they’d been tracking and could reference with ease. They could benefit from each others’ ideas and insights. A thousand fans could crack the code more easily and more quickly than a single critic.
I remember watching season two of Lost and seeing, near the end of an episode, what I though was a logo on the tail of a shark and I thought, as one would, “Did I just see a Dharma logo on the tail of that shark!?”. Had I been watching in the age of solo fandom I’d have to wait weeks for an answer. But because I lived in the age of participatory culture, I could visit a fan board and not ten minutes after it aired I could see a screenshot of that shark tail and, sure enough, there was that logo.
This participatory approach has led to an explosion of content about content. How many single use podcasts can you name? There’s the one devoted to individual episodes of the X-Files or every single West Wing episode or every single James Bond movie. There’s An Archive of Our Own housing transformative works of every stripe and wikis for nearly every topic imaginable including not just Minecraft but individual Minecraft mods.
This hyperspecific content about content is now more frequent than larger format approaches to content coverage. Gone are the Premiere magazines covering all of cinema. Entertainment Weekly is about the only mass entertainment publication left covering a broad spectrum of content. It’s now easier to find, and sustain, the niche.
Similarly, we find ourselves not only creating content about content, but using content to create content about content. When we want to recap a show (a content form initialized by the internet) we don’t just write a recap, we actually use screenshots from the show to comment on the show.
When we want to communicate an emotion or reaction via Slack or text, we use a gif, perhaps even moreso than emoji. It just expresses more, even if we don’t get the pop culture reference.
Content is no longer a thing you buy and sell. Content is now a literacy.
We mix and match content at will, with a fluency that denotes familiarity with and love of different pop culture threads. Take Sherlocked Development and its ilk, where quotes from Arrested Development are matched with images from Sherlock.
The modern content fluency is why I challenge any company right now to co-create its content strategy with their audience. I’ve done it before. At LavaCon, a content strategy conference, I ran a session where the audience for LavaCon and the executive director of LavaCon collaborated to create a content strategy for the event. And the resulting strategy from that collaboration is bound to be more impactful than one created in a vacuum. Participatory isn’t just about content, it’s about the strategy itself.
Our next lesson is the final, and perhaps most surprising, one of all.
This is part six of my “7 Lessons from the Future of Content” series. Be sure to check out…
Part One: Tools Are Cheap, Time Is Expensive
Part Three: The New Meaning of Success
Part Four: Making Money on Anything Except Content
