second brain

twitter saved the tv star

The trouble with TV, people have been saying for years, is that it's not interactive. It's a passive medium, and for a generation raised on the internet, that's a big problem, especially since interactive TV turned out to be such a flop.

The other problem identified is that TV isn't social. It's a one-to-many technology. Not only can I not talk back to it, I can't use it to talk to my friends.

TV has proved fairly resilient so far, however. It's showed no sign of going the way of the CD. This shouldn't be so surprising - you can't beat a big screen with moving pictures and decent sound for entertainment, immersion and emotional power. Nor is it easy to replicate that feeling of sharing in a communal moment you get when you watch any programme with a big audience.

But there's something else. I think what people have underestimated is TV's adaptability - the way that it works as a hub for plug-in devices. DVR (Sky Plus/Tivo etc) is the most obvious. But a plug-in doesn't literally have to plug in, or be designed for TV-compatibility, to function as enhancer of the TV experience.

Twitter is a TV plug-in. As this New York Times piece explains, people are using Twitter more and more as a kind of user-created subtitling, or commentary (adoring/trashing/ironising) on whatever's on the box. "Event TV" in particular benefits from this effect. In the US, audiences for large events like audiences for large events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics have been breaking records - we've seen  the same here with X-Factor. This effect may be good news in particular for the biggest, established mainstream channels (ITV here, NBC/ABC etc in the US) which have lost so much share in recent years, because they have the conversation-generating reach, and mass-appeal content that smaller channels don't.

So one way to think about Twitter is as the latest in a short but powerful series of TV-enhancing innovations (colour, remote controls, video, DVR...). Twitter effectively plugs those two holes in the TV offer: interactivity and social-ness. But it's not a one-way benefit: social media benefit because TV brings what they don't have - an immersive sensory experience.

Together, TV and Twitter form a powerfully compelling nexus. It will be around for a while yet.

the new etiquette of flow

A provocative little picture-essay from Peggy Nelson that argues we've moved from the etiquette of individuals communicating with each other one at a time to a new mode of always-on, always-connected communication:

We’re beginning to inhabit ad hoc, overlapping, always-on virtual salons—you’re talking to someone, and then you both get pulled off into different directions, to form different shapes and vectors within the conversations, and then come together again, having never really been apart. You can even have multiple conversations via multiple media with the same person at one time. Single conversations are one-dimensional chess. Once you master multiplicity, who’s to say how far you will go? Correction: how far we will go. For we will all go together, wherever it is that we are going.

Don't underestimate, however, the value of solitude and introspection - an ability which will become more, not less valuable, in this new age.

google goes trad

Excuse my lateness to this, but last month hell froze over:

I've never believed that, as some claim, big branding campaigns and/or TV advertising will die any time soon. It's just become one weapon in a brand's armoury, rather than the only or default one. Any time you gets serious competition on product grounds (as Google now has with Bing) it becomes important to build emotional values into the brand - and TV (ie moving pictures + sound + big screen) is still the best way to do that.

And I think it's a very clever ad. It's incredibly hard to infuse emotion into a) a web-based brand, b) a demonstration ad, c) an impersonal global brand. But somehow they found a way of doing it.

Whilst we're on Google, all media owners need to heed Martin Sorrell's recent words:

“Google is a media owner, not a technology company.”

NBC/ITV/Sky should be afraid. But at least they might be getting some ad monies from their nemesis along the road to their destruction.