Tag Archives: Content

If a song gets played in the woods and there is nobody there to meme it, does it make a sound?

I had a fascinating conversation with a great and very smart friend last week. Among the many things we discussed, we touched on what it means to be culturally relevant in 2012.

With mass audiences rapidly splintering and subdividing into various tribes and subcultures, does broad cultural relevance exist beyond huge news stories, live sports and blockbuster movies? We all watch our own shows, listen to our own music and find the news and information that matters to us. Everything that isn’t interesting or relevant, we just ignore.

So what is a hit anymore? The shelf life for anything that sparks our imagination has become so short. New shows, songs, articles, movies, books and memes crowd our inboxes and social feeds every day, demanding our limited attention. If something doesn’t grab our immediate interest, chances are it will disappear quickly.

Music is especially hard hit as physical formats are rapidly disappearing and most music can be found for free without much effort. Plus, there is just so much available. We can all find the music that matters most to us and the multi-platinum crossover records just don’t happen anymore. I’ve noticed that the only songs that really ascend to mass popularity are those that become omnipresent cultural memes, parodied, lip dubbed and burned into our collective cultural conscience.

So does the song make the meme or does the meme make the song?

Two recent songs we’ve all heard way too many times are perfect examples of what it means to be a hit in 2012. Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” have both become mega-hits, overplayed and hogging the cultural spotlight. But are they relevant on their own merits or because they have become ubiquitous hit memes that reach way beyond the original work?

I heard “Call Me Maybe” several times, but it was the Harvard baseball team’s video that seemed to propel it into the stratosphere. A friend sent me the Gotye video months ago, but it was just another catchy song until the Walk Off the Earth cover or the Star Wars parody showed up on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Cultural relevance almost seems determined by the broad meta-meming (yeah, I think I just made that word up) of the original rather than the original itself.

Will this phenomenon extend across all forms of content where everything becomes an ultimately disposable meme? Or will content become a truly fascinating and creative space where art, music, film, television and books all serve as source material for a virtual cultural palimpsest with deep meaning and resonance? My guess leans toward the former, but I want to know what you think.

Little Bear is Everywhere – Kids, Cable and Commercials

Back in 2006 when my son was 3, I realized how profoundly different his relationship with media would be than mine. His favorite show was on TV, DVR, iPod, DVD, cellphone, online and even on VHS for the VCR at a remote summer house. He could watch it whenever and wherever he wanted without commercials.

Yes, Little Bear was everywhere!

Fast forward to today and I have noticed something even more compelling. My kids haven’t turned the TV on in weeks. Yes, they don’t watch television, but they watch plenty of content. They are almost in complete control of their media diets and they avoid commercials at all costs.

My daughter is 7 and she consumed a fairly high percentage of the billion hours streamed on Netflix in June. She has appropriated one of my iPads and is usually found in her room or sprawled on the couch enjoying hours of commercial-free shows.

My 9 year old son is glued to YouTube and he can skip pre-rolls and delete InVideo Ad Overlays like a pro. While he can’t quite keep up with the 48 hours of video uploaded every minute he is giving it a good go.

Yesterday GigaOm announced an e-book called Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.. I might spend the $4.99 to shake my last bit of cable addiction, but I think Little Bear and my kids already beat them to it.

Content on Shuffle

I want to explore how we discover and experience content. The intersection of search, curation and sharing under the umbrella of discovery is fascinating and constantly changing. How does it impact how we interpret the world around us and how we learn? And how does the digital world affect how we socialize and share our experiences with others?

Growing up I listened to records, watched live television, listened to live radio, read a morning or afternoon paper, watched movies in a theater and read the magazines available at the local drug or bookstore. Content was relatively scarce and distribution highly controlled. I quickly gravitated to books and music because I could control and curate my own experience.

Sharing content was difficult, but we all shared the experience, gathered around the TV at the same time. We all watched the same movies and shows and heard much of the same music. Curation was often top down. Rigid TV schedules. Highly formatted radio stations. Mass media was exactly that. Content created and curated for mass audiences.

In the 80s and 90s things began to change with the broad proliferation of cable channels, the Sony Walkman and the adoption of VCRs and DVD players among other things. Choice multiplied and so did the number of devices in any household. The common familial, social experience of media was giving way to individual experience. Not only was there more content, we could share it more easily, copying and trading music, movies and TV shows.

Today content is ubiquitous. Distribution is ubiquitous and often confusing. Our individual media experiences are unique and generally self-curated. With millions of websites, thousands of digitized songs, hundreds of DVDs, our phones, ipods and ipads filled with apps, games, music, books, movies and TV shows, plus hours of programming recorded from hundreds of channels on DVRs, how do we provide context? How do we discover and curate great media experiences?

It’s now a world of content on shuffle. So many amazing media experiences are immediately available on a multitude of platforms. We have amazing tools to share and recommend to our friends, families and social media acquaintances. How has this all redefined sharing? How has it redefined us? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.