I was lucky to be invited to a seminar principally for academics about ephemeral media, at University of Nottingham. I’d never heard the term ‘ephemeral media’ before, which in this context was used to describe short-form, fleeting media often overlooked by academia – but which plays a key role in understanding how media is evolving particularly through immersion with social media. This event looked particularly at new forms of online video.
Rather than being full of (my worst fear) incomprehensible academic musings, the event was actually full of useful theoretical ideas and examples of how e-drama and media content is evolving, where it came from, and what it all means. Here’s a taster of my highlights from two days worth of very informed and interesting papers from the workshops entitled: “Internet Attractions: online video and user-generated ephemera”
Barbara Klinger – fan re-enactment
Barbara Klinger (Indiana University) showed many examples of fan re-enactment in relation to fan fiction and film including ‘movieocke’, originating from the ‘Den of Cin’ bar in New York where people get together to re-enact favourite scenes from movies, a ‘re-play’ of movie culture. This has been professionalised by some, e.g. Charles Ross – One Man Star Wars, where Ross, a professional actor, plays all characters and hums the music and FX in a show which is part parody, part homage, part spectacle.
Chris Strombolis and friends re-enacted the whole of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” over many years, originally bootlegging early screenings in the days before home video. The film later gained many cult screenings. Fan re-enactments often have comic and parodying effects through its low-tech bricolage.
Re-enactments often use their original locations e.g. The Blob at Phoenixville, an annual re-enactment as patrons flee the Colonial cinema in the 1950s horror flick, or Lebowskifest , a homage to a recent classic film celebrating the culture of the drop-out and misfit hero. These couldn’t help to me bringing to mind Stewart Lee’s fantastic parody of Del Boy falling thorugh the bar in Only Fools and Horses translated into a folk fayre legend. The re-enactment movement is led by men; female re-eanctment is usually associated with female led films (we can also see these trends in role play and gaming more widely).
Klinger views ephemeral media as fragments, fleeting, not treated seriously as academia but it de and re-contextualises media and is fundamental to an understanding of intertextuality which allows works to survive and develop outside of conventional releases.
Hugh Hancock, Strange Company – Machinima
The inimicable Hugh Hancock, one of the world’s leading machinima makers (indeed he even coined the name), who I enjoyed working with recently on the “Education for Leisure” machinima production, delivered his usual high-energy romp through machinima past, present and future.
Whilst the internet is primarily driven in innovation by porn, machinima is another innovation of pushing existing technology forward in new and unexpected ways. Machinima began with Quake c.1999, the first game to incorporate a sandbox for, with difficulty, playing and editing scenes. It is defined as computer generated animation using existing virtual platforms e.g. console games or virtual worlds.
Theoretically using machinima it is possible to create film works with one person, or certainly a small production team, which increases the artistic independence of the director. Academic theorist Michael Nietsche recognized two types of machinima:
‘Inside-out’ – fan movies made by gamers, often about the game
‘Outside-In’ – filmmakers use machinima as a new tool for animated drama
Machinima has since fragmented into many different sub-genres specific to different games e.g. Sims 1999 site – all use different editors, voice actors and production studios. Rufus Cubed’s World of Warcraft inside-out games attract 10M viewers. These are huge communities with economic power – but they quickly dissipate as the game ages.
In 2006 machinima got noticed by the industry: there was a rush from games producers to hire the best machinima makers. Many went inside and produced segments for games but didn’t go back to making machinima. Often their work can only be seen by playing hours of the game up to different levels of game, becoming ephemeral due to the limited audiences who can see it and replay ability reducing viewing access.
Machinima makers face a glass ceiling: they can’t break into traditional media due to big games makers e.g. EA denying permission to produce series and DVDs or negotiate royalty splits, e.g. 2006’s Male Restroom Etiquette by Phil Rice which never made it through to a series despite a commission offered. The big crux: machinima has yet to have a big court case determining rights and usage. Could machinima be covered under ‘fair use’ copyright? Machinima is not ‘copying’ but photographing characters. But makers need to challenge and negotiation more with the industry. Hugh survives as a machinma maker because he doesn’t have an allergy to talking to lawyers.
Machinima, as a form of immediate animation, can, like other types of social media, be used as a force for community and political change. Stealth Legislation was made within 48 hours to show the effects of EU immiment internet legislation.
Microsoft’s Project Natal is a new Xbox motion capture suite under £500 which could revolutionise machinima, particiularly if it becomes linked to Second Life, plus a £100 facial recognition software could mean avatars represent people in real-time triggered by real-life actions. This could have big effects for both social and business e.g. virtual conferencing, and also benefit indie film-makers by rapidly creating sophisticated graphics e.g. animated characters mapped onto real people’s movements. Machinima and performance capture are on a colition course to mesh into one media.
Tracy Harwood (De Montfort University)’s machinima study discussed definitions of co-creation (participation) and co-production (collaboration on the project), describing the medium as about socialism and the social, concerned with collaboration and sharing within the community.
Daniel Ashton (Bath Spa University) believes machinima is in a transition form from amateur to professional, or “cresting the Horizon” (Hugh Hancock, 2007). Limitations are often to do with the framing of its creators; Lowood believes players should express their work as content developers rather than players, where hacking mixes technological mastery with subversion.
Quality machinima worth viewing:
‘The Stolen Child’ – a Second Life created film by Lainy Voom (aka Trace Henderson)
Bloodspell – Hugh Hancock’s fantasty machinima feature film
‘The Journey’ – Appears as a 2D animation through post-production effects
Red v Blue “Going Global” – commission of the original and most famous machinima serial for Machinma Europe festival as a critique of European film genres
Rebekah Willett – camera phone, production and identity
A study of camera phone production – why people do it and what they film, which is an interesting but little studied area. Camera videos are ephemeral in the nature of what’s recorded – yet little is deleted from servers – but its symbolic value is more important than its legibility. Statistically:
1/3 make personal documentary – e.g. family, friends
¼ make non-personal e.g. weather, landscape
¼ make public performance e.g. recording gigs
Sam Coley – online practices of david bowie fans
Coley, a radio documentary producer, discussed interactivity and fan culture from a producer’s perspective. He produced a documentary about the 25th anniversary of Bowie’s 1983 concert, New Zealand’s biggest ever gig, which you can listen to here. It includes a charming original recording of a short song Bowie wrote for his Maori hosts.
Fans communities are reshaping documentary production, offering feedback mechanisms to benefit the producer in pre-production but also give a life to the documentary extending far beyond broadcast. YouTube Insight is a fine-grained analytics tool which allows producers to analyse how users are interacting with the video or audio content and who the audience is. Audio clip shows, taking advantage of the screen for radio on platforms like digital TV and YouTube, is a new way of re-imaging what radio looks like and placing audio within a multimedia context.
Jon Dovey (University of West of England) – Archeologies, Economies and Ecologies
We’re in the grip of a second dotcom boom: plenty of hype and money thrown at unknown entities. But what is the value of user-generated content: Democratic? Economic? Political?
Echoing my own views that social media et al is nothing new: the 1970s Bay Area ‘radical computing’ movement predicted the power of information over land. Today Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Fake and Butterfield (Flickr) and Matt Mulanwey (Wordpress) all emphasise the importance of allowing users to create without technical skills, so creating and accessing media becomes something normal than eventually everyone can do.
The utopia of access for all through the internet is perhaps a Victorian, elitist world view: globally only 17.4% of people can access the web (70% in the developed world). Barabasi looks at the topology of the web, like an aerial view of the rainforest we only see the tops of trees, or a snapshot of all the billions of pieces of information available. Relationships are critical to navigate this forest: comunity management is the starting point of online marketing.
Henry Jenkins believes fan fiction developed into YouTube, though the platform will lose $470M in 2009 – parallel with loss-leading web 1.0 (1999-2001) hype and speculation which leads to the hollow speculative incomes for developer-entrepreneurs. KateModern, a new form of interactive drama content, only attracted 25M views, 150K per webisode, and that resulted from involuntary pop-ups on users profiles. Bebo sold for £850M and immediately its user-base declined.
Bauwens, a web1.0 entrepreneur who went on to establish the Peer-To-Peer Foundation,proposed three types of P2P networks:
1) Capitalist- e.g. crowd-sourcing around a commercial product
2) Sharing economy – expression, e.g. YouTube
3) Peer production proper – collaboration to create social artifacts, though business may profit (e.g. advertising)
William Merrin – Understanding Me-dia
In the first reformation, the printing press liberating text from purely spreading the word of god. Today is the second reformation, liberating producers from established publishers and markets. This presents challenges: volume, dispersal, ephemerality (devices, meaning) and access (e.g. network owner control) and needs a new form of analysis – a ‘Media Studies 2.0′: traditional media studies focus on broadcast era, we now need to look at post-broadcast ecologies as a new entity, not just as a continuation of fan culture.
Elizabeth Evans: Kate Modern
Kate Modern, the social media online soap, is actually anti-ephermal content – 14hrs of content, continually available as a permanent, virtual object. Participation from engagement in the content is only truly possible within a few days of broadcast before the story moves on.
Various interactive exhibition structures were use like marathons (12 films distributed in 12 hours), quizzes (like ‘where is Kate?’) and live events – a live filming which took place on Carnaby St 10am, encouraging audience to participate which leads to deeper engagement and more viral activity. This was a great analysis, and extends the article I wrote about Kate Modern while it was original broadcast.
Rik Lander – www.u-soap.com
Lander, as a producer of seminal e-drama, offered an interesting practitioner and historic perspective on the form. There are various funding methods for e-drama:
DIY parody
Showreels – to gain professional work
Corporations
Sponsored
Un-funded pure creativity
And many forms of e-drama:
Tv on the web
Linear webby
Interactive
Participatory
It requires many different questions of production like, who is holding the camera? Not a concern of TV but its imperative to internet drama
Lander’s first production was Magic Tree (2001) using text and web (HTML/Flash) as the options available for bandwidth. Viewers were sent a box with chocolate twigs and a magical growing tree, mixing the personal with the consumable. Video is now the currency of e-drama, although potentially e-drama becomes an extension of film and TV rather than a mixed media production.
Lander went on to produce Wannabes for BBC, a teen drama which works on creating friendship ratings and giving advice from characters using video within an interactive database.
Together Alone is a pilot project using actors, crowd-sourced from a talent show format, all over world directly virtually by Skype and montaged together in edit, which gives an endearing inconsistency as settings differ and objects interface from one ’set’ to another.
For e-drama, production viability for acquiring funders is 250,000 viewers, though Bebo et al will claim to sponsors that 20M or more will view it. Only a fraction of users are likely to be participatory but they are critical for the development of the production. The web is platform for something ground-breaking and innovative, but not necessarily for producing the highest quality or longevity in film works.
Claire Wardle (Cardiff University)– UGC at the BBC
As part of an AHRC extensive study into user generated content across several BBC departments, Wardle’s study look at its use in news (download the report here). Its a small minority who submit UGC who are not representative of the whole audience. 90% of contents is thought to originate from 1% of users.
There are many barriers to participation: technological, impetus (why do it?), perception of those who contribute – plus the digital divide. UGC works best with specific calls to action – say what news gatherers want to know about rather than just asking people to have their say (as this parody website testifies, the results of user’s views can be absurd to the extreme). UGC has the benefits of networked journalism: audiences knows more on subject as ‘lay experts’.
72% of people have never contributed material to a news organisation, though interestingly the most popular contributory media is newspapers (17%), radio (9%), tv (7%) and finally websites (4%).
Moderation of UGC is still valuable: Sky i-News allowed people to upload whatever news they want, assuming the community would extract false news but after eroneous news of Steve Jobs’s death caused shares to drop they realised the need for curating/policing.
Conclusions
Overall this was a fascinating and insightful event, thanks to Paul Grainge from University of Nottingham for organising it and letting me observe it. What was key to me was that online media is far from ephemeral – prolific and difficult to decipher with new rules of symbolism and engagement which defies the usual structures of broadcasting and intrepretation typical of academic media studies.
