For content creators, artists, creatives, we often do more of what we used to do. It often works, why change it too much? But one change is determining whether the art is likely to spread and be recognised: is what we’re making today internet-native?
To be internet-native is to be ideal for sharing and spreading, to be accessible and distributable. Even if we’re talking about a physical object, fans will spread photographs and text about it when given the chance. But the more adverts and clamours for attention that we have - songs, posters, banner adverts, advergames, digital billboards, screens - the less chance a signal has of being spotted in the noise.
Great creations won’t be automatically recognised because they’re great: they have to be noticed, too.
Attention is our scarcest resource. Time ticks on, but there are still and will forever be 24 hours in a day. Attention is everything. We pick out signals from the noise by listening to trusted sources: friends, and favourite authors, bloggers, tweeters, journalists, broadcasters, remixers. Curators, all of them. They spread the word, we investigate, to revel in the shared experience.
Sometimes the curators spread the works, too: two thirds of teenagers admit (and how many don’t admit?) to sharing music, digitally, without paying for it. Of course they do: music is all about identity, and teenagehood is about creating and playing with identity. Copyright maximalists like Feargal Sharkey want them to stop this sharing, to go back to buying music and hoarding it, to learn to “respect copyright”.
It won’t work. We can’t tell the majority of a population that they’re criminals now for doing something humans intrinsically want to do, like sharing songs. Internet-native music currently looks like a free song, probably containing a code for discounts on merchandise and live event tickets. Kids are never going back to buying music when it’s already free and shareable. Why should they?
Progress: television is next, and books, newspapers. One by one, the analogue business models of the past will be picked apart and digitised. Modernised. Many will fail, new ones will emerge, some will evolve. Internet-native television is television delivered globally at broadcast, on-demand. Probably containing product placement, or built-in sponsorship. Delivered to a collected audience, about whom the broadcaster knows really quite a lot. Maybe with short and nicely-targeted advertising delivered alongside. It’s worth a try.
“Piracy” – as done by teenagers, all my friends, pretty much everyone I know, is simply demand where appropriate supply does not exist. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies – in other words, anti-copying, anti-fair use - are also anti-accessibility. They attempt to block and restrict, and they fail every time. Every single time. To be accessible, work needs to be available, always and to everyone. No delineations, no restrictions: it’s too messy. Too expensive. Too dull.
Restricting access restricts a person’s ability, as a creator, to be discovered. We must embrace accessibility, and think open and global. Think spreadable and shareable. Perhaps free, perhaps not: see what works. Try it: if you have a digitised creation, try selling digital copies. Try giving it away for free, alongside a tip jar. See what happens. Examine internet-native content producers like Joss Whedon – who has made far more money personally from his internet-native Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog than he has for his Fox-broadcast Dollhouse – and Felicia Day, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Justin.tv, Ze Frank. The entire community of Etsy craftants and Spreadshirt-ers.
Accessibility gives us competitive, business advantage. It is inclusive of the blind and partially-sighted, who make up 70% of us humans over our life spans. It is inclusive of other cultures and tastes, and gives the creator access to a potential audience of Everyone. It’s inclusive of learning and the sharing of knowledge. The accessible content will leapfrog the locked-down content. It’s cheaper, too, and doesn’t that make business sense?
To push past bigger, older, more established businesses, the solution is to be agile and modern, to be internet-native and innovative. The older, slower dinosaur-works will sink, weighed down by their expensive defenses, regulations and costly and pointless protection mechanisms. We must not let these dying behemoths take away someone’s internet access – and connection to the world - for some accusatory, unprovable “piracy” claim, ever. We must not let the internet’s neutrality be bought and sold by corporations. This is our free and global internet, in our 21st Century, and thinking of accessibility, it’s our greatest asset yet.
Alice Taylor
Wonderland blog www.wonderlandblog.com
Commissioning Editor, Education, Channel 4 Television
For Perspectives www.perspectives.creativescotland.org.uk
These views are the personal views of Alice Taylor, not Channel 4 Television
The 20th Century Has Gone
Comments
Very nice site!
Hey Lucy, are you Alice's agent? ;)
Where the hell's Alice? I want Alice I want Alice! ;P
Is this "crowdsourcing"? When Creative Scotland's artists make it big, do we strategists on here get a cut/piece of the action? ;)
Ok, well, I want to be Director.
This website is not good for the eyes. It is important that this discussion is accessible for it to be meaningful.
This website is not good for the eyes. Accessibility in websites is rather important if we are to have an accesible debate here!!
Not sure whether a handy Idea is what is needed here!
The way that Creative Scotland should address this is to clearly articulate what it means by accessibility in the context of culture and then have clear strategies in developing and supporting accessibility. This means that Creative Scotland actually needs to develop some clear strategies, which are currently absent!
My suggestion is that Creative Scotland should draw on our shared knowledge and expertise to help formulate these.
As I have said earlier I think the problem with the current format of discussion is that by it's very nature it might well exclude the people that we would want to reach when talking about accessib
The problem in tackling this is that a culture shift is needed in thinking about accessibility. Accessibility should not be seen as getting the right 'assistive tools' in place (e.g. a ramp, interpretation, captioning, education) but rather a shift in thinking around creation and presentation. It is about imagination, creativity, quality of engagement and not about helping people.
The problem with saying it's not about "helping" people, is that those who do not regard access as a priority use this sort of comment as an excuse to provide nothing.
So far as my experience with the performing arts goes, often the biggest problem is that, with some notable exceptions, it is left to the venues to take responsibility for access. Accessibility should be a concern for us all.
No-one will ever get access right unless and until people with various different access requirements are involved in planning, designing and delivering solutions. Too many people make assumptions about what does and does not work for people. Or I could be a bit more cynical and say it's more about doing as little as you think you can get away with.
would you like the post a suggestion for how Creative Scotland might address this on the Ideas section?
Please keep your comments coming to the site. Are there any new topics you would like to open up about Accessibility in general terms?
What about issues around physical access to art spaces and the live experience - how might we make the idea of going to see the opera or an exhibition more inviting to a new generation of audiences?
Picking up on Richard Saville-Smith's posting on the 23rd, I'd like to describe a project that relates to his point about the need for internet social networking-style projects needing to remain fo
The theatre company I run, Magnetic North, is in the early stages (launched last month) of an SAC-funded project that uses some of the conventions of social networking to engage an audience with our work at an early stage and, hopefully, keep them engaged up to the point where they come to the performance. People who sign up to Open Source wlll get access to the development process of new projects as they progress - we will post research material, references, drafts, notes between creative partners etc so that those who wish to can follow the process right through to coming to a performance. This process may take up to a year so one challenge is to keep people coming back to the site throughout, not dropping out after the first month. There's also a risk for us, of course, because we making publically available material that may be at a very early stage, but I think that the potential return (an audience that is truly engaged with new work) justifies the risk. One of the important parts of this process is that we will also be doing live events for members along the way (i.e. readings of drafts, open rehearsals) - I don't believe that online presence will be enough to really build the relationships strongly enough.
At this stage we have no idea what the eventual take-up will be, but through this project we are taking a long term view and making the process as well as the outcome accessible.