Shirky and Group Formation

Over the weekend I went and saw the movie Amelia, directed by Mira Nair and starring Hillary Swank in the title role. The film was alright. The aerial photography was beautiful and everything looks great. The art direction and the costumes all work together to put you in the 30s. But the story itself feels anticlimactic; it kind of coasts along but it never soars. I think it is safe to say that 99.9% of people know what happens to Amelia in the end, so there’s not a whole lot to build up to, but still I think she’s interesting enough that in the hands of a different director and writer this movie could have been a lot better. I felt a little like I did after seeing Valkyrie last year. After that film I wanted to write the producers and tell them, “I know they don’t kill Hitler, so stop trying to convince me your movie is a thriller and supposed to keep me guessing! There’s no guesswork here!”

Alas historical movies continually get made, and it seems that filmmakers like to take the approach that people don’t know their history, so they spell it out, which just makes me feel a little insulted.

Now coincidentally, tonight on the news, there was a short story pointing out the box office success of the film Paranormal Activity. It is the number movie in the country right now, with a total gross so far of about 33 million. The estimated budget was $15,000. It stars a handful of unknown actors. It was written, directed, and edited by one person. The total cast and crew listed on Imdb is about 25. In contrast, Amelia had a high-profile award winning cast and crew, yet made (granted this is only its first opening weekend) 4 million. According to the news program I saw, it had a budget of $100,000 million. It’s got a ways to go before it even breaks even.

There’s a lot of contrasting points that could be made between the films. Paranaormal was shot on a very low budget, Amelia a typical high Hollywood budget. Paranormal was shot in digital, Amelia was shot on 35mm. Paranormal plays off a documentary storytelling style, Amelia is a standard classical Hollywood bio-pic. You could say that the difference between these two movies is a generational gap in how to make a movie. Low budget films are finding ways to distribute themselves cheaper and more easily than ever before now, with greater success than ever.

This relates directly to what Shirky talks about in Here Comes Everybody. In the opening story about the lost cell phone, we see the power of group effort as people rallied behind Evan’s efforts to get his friend’s cell phone back. As people found his site through word of mouth, some marketing, and probably some random findings, they connected and communicated. Group effort is not new, and Shirky recognizes this, he just notes that the modes of how the group forms have changed/are changing. For cult movies, the distribution of the film is usually limited. However a ‘cult following’ develops mostly out of communication, by word-of-mouth. Someone sees the movie, they tell their friends they like it, and pretty soon the movie gets a reputation and it’s still talked about for years to come. Now with social networks, people can self-promote to their followers until the sun comes up, via something like Twitter for instance. Then someone else can RT (retweet) and thus promote them to a new set of followers and the cycle continues...

Shirky explains how group formation and group promotion is easier than ever with the internet. And he seems to have great faith in people to not only form groups but act on them. All this organizing happens outside established institutions. I think the main point of the book is that community can work easier than managerial corporations with these new technologies. There is a downside though. On the one hand, independent films can be promoted easier with fewer pricey advertisements. Bands can put their music up through creative commons or free downloads and thus gain a fan base without ever coming near a record company. People can find other people who share their interests and communicate and collaborate with each other. In the best examples, people collaborate and bring about social change and act out in the world like ARGs or the recent PAC-We.Then again groups can form that are malicious to their members, like the pro-anorexia groups. It seems that it is in their right to have websites under free speech, but to what degree is that ok? I don’t think Shirky really addresses these kind of issues where group formation is harmful to others.

But when it comes to the state of movies at the box office. When a $15,000 independent movie can find itself at a film festival and be seen by Spielberg and thus hit theaters nationwide to make millions and millions of dollars, I have to wonder what the future state of film promotion will be. The amateur film can be made better and easier than ever, and can compare to the high-tech big productions of Hollywood films. (I mean something like the Canon 5D Mark II is visually stunning at a fraction of the price of most film cameras). So maybe even an institution like Hollywood isn’t safe from this social change that is occurring with internet revolution. (yup, i’m starting to think revolution now)

McLuhan and Twitterisms

I’ll be honest, I had a hard time with McLuhan’s theories on media. With just two of his readings, I put him on level with Chomsky or Foucault. I only get about half of what they say, but damn I feel smarter for reading them.

Part of McLuhan’s argument is that technology is an extension of ourselves. He’s famous for saying “the medium is the message,” that is to say, that a medium (a technology) is the part that affects the world, not the content that the medium is communicating. This I understood (I think). Culture is built upon technology. Each new technology is built upon a previous technology. (Of course I then wonder wouldn’t there be an “original technology”? Something that started off everything that exists now? But that’s another blog...) For McLuhan, the invention of the phonetic alphabet, an arbitrary system as we know from Saussure, was the catalyst that took the ancient cultures from multi-sensory to visually focused, and set off a series of technological innovations leading us to the present and the internet. McLuhan though, believes that there are these technologies/mediums that communicate their own content, but the message isn’t in the content. It is in the medium itself. The medium is what influences us.

So, I tried to apply this to the media/technology that I use and know and what the mediums themselves teach me, and not their content. I only recently began tweeting, although I’ve known of it for a long time and had done some browsing to see what it was about. At first glance it seemed frivolous to me. People were having incomplete conversations, making observations and sending them out in to the internet void to be commented on not. (Enter made-up example tweets off the top of my head: “Going to the movies later with Jordan!,” “Saw a Sarah Palin look alike today and really wanted to break her glasses in two” etc. etc.)

Ok so while that was what I thought was the content of the majority of tweets out there, and the reason I avoided tweeting until it was asked of me for class, I have to admit, since I have begun using twitter I’ve become fascinated with the process of it.

Most of the tweets out there are conversational. A large number are self-promotional. A good amount is the sharing of information such as youtube, news stories, blogs. Then there’s this guy. Some *twitteres are actually trying to produce literature in 140 characters? That’s interesting since many fear the internet for making us illiterate.

What I find intriguing is how many different ways there are to fill 140 characters with. This to me is the epitome of the “medium is message” argument. I would say that the medium of twitter is the 140 character limit, the content varies from person to person. What then can we make of such short snippets of story? Stories have a long history in the world. Stories existed long before written language, in the oral traditions of ancient civilizations. In fact, the way I see it, most of the mediums that McLuhan discusses (newspapers, movies, television in particular) are story-telling mediums. Human communication, and maybe this is my Western-based perspective, is about story-telling.

So, if the medium limits our story-telling ability, what does that do to our culture? Do we adapt and learn to bottom-line stories? Does it limit our thoughts or teach us to think quicker on our feet? Do debates get shortened to one-line blurbs? I think these things already happen in many instances and the danger I see is that the world is not so black-and-white. And while 140 characters is a nice bit to start off a conversation or a debate, I ask is it enough to fully explain the world? One of the things that McLuhan also contends is that we are largely unaware of the affect that media has on us. Luckily though, as a student in this program, we are learning to explore the mediums of new media and analyze them and pick them apart. And that’s largely what McLuhan was also getting at in his writings. He said that there are a few who don’t just sit as on the sidelines as media changes our minds and culture and that the only trick with “new media” is the speed of it. We have to think quicker because the medium changes so quickly. Maybe that’s something that the twitter-medium is preparing us for. To think quicker and more concisely, in fewer characters.

My opinion of the affects of shortened messages is not complete and I would love to hear some others thoughts on the matter.



*Side note: What is the noun of a person who tweets? Tweeterer?