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I am currently researching one of The Second Sight's topical foci: the economic, technological, and contentual cross-fertilization between the media, entertainment and the defense sector. 

For a general description of the technological cross-fertilization between entertainment and defense please read the January 2008 post: Military Entertainment Complex - the U.S. Entertainment Superpower or my June 2006 post, Creatonomics.

For a look at the cultural significance and asset of U.S. economic dominance in content production and distribution, see the March 2007 entry  The Arab Media Revolution - War of Ideas.  As I wrote then, "Lest we forget, creative content has a social impact as well as an economic value. I have always argued on this site, that media and entertainment sectors are undervalued assets in the American consciousness (both in terms of the economy and in terms of their social benefit in a global war of ideas)."  In another August 2006 post,  Why the fractured Chinese Market will never Buy your Movie?: The cultural and geo-political benefit of U.S. dominance in content creation and distribution "reminds me of what Simon Cowell remarked to Larry King in March this year [2006] when asked about the prohibition of "American Idol" like shows in China.  Says Cowell:

"Well, because it's a democracy, isn't it? You know, I mean, it's the public voting. So you can understand why they're getting slightly nervous about it. Because it wasn't our show in China, it was the laughing cow, so-and-so, so-and-so competition. And the public got to vote. And suddenly there were demos, and it was democracy. And I think the government went, we don't want this. So then they put out a stupid comment like that. You know? It's that we must control the public. Crazy."

What is the nature of the so called 'military entertainment complex' (also known as 'miltary nintendo complex') and what drives its organization?  The answer to the latter question is found in the maintenance of U.S. global military hegemony.  If the U.S. military is the primary global military power, and this hegemony is based on the ability of the U.S. Navy to dominate the world's oceans, then the condition of hegemony is partially based on the superior numbers and technology of U.S. naval vessels and augmented significantly by U.S. dominance in space-based reconnaissance technology, made possible by entertainment software consumers and movie goers world-wide.  In other words, the mainenance of U.S. global military hegemony, requires the continued militarization of outer and cyberspace; and the pentagon's organizational evolution and strategic positioning against asymmetric threats. 

We are focusing in the next few weeks on cyberwarefare.  Cyberwarefare encompasses a lot of terrain: “from posting misinformation on a blog to crashing a national stock exchange." That means cyberwarefare also encompasses media strategy (the production, distribution, and marketing of cultural content and propoganda) along the organs of communication from traditional media and their hybrids to the internet. 

For example, in a 2006 analysis, Stratfor, a private intelligence service, posted that al Qaeda’s relationship with the media was evolving so that it increasingly relied on the internet to accomplish organizational objectives, including communication and recruitment.  Whereas bin Laden and al-Zawahiri relied on traditional Arabic media outlets to distribute message, al-Zarqawi use of the internet shows the evolving ‘informational wing’ and philosophy of the new generation of al Qaeda:

Within this vein, al Qaeda in Iraq has used the Internet in two very significant ways: to disseminate propaganda in real time, and to shape public perceptions and debate in both the Islamic and Western spheres. In other words, the Web has been a timely, efficient and effective tool for conducting information warfare, which is key for breaking the will of the enemy and in motivating one’s own forces.

Another parallel that Stratfor posits in the same 2006 report is how this newer generation of ‘dot com’ terrorists compares in operational efficiency to their silicone valley counterparts of a decade prior.

It is not yet clear what the future will hold for al-Zarqawi’s organization in, but for the evolving generation of jihadists as a whole, past could be prologue. Ultimately, the dot-com terrorists might learn the same lessons as the dot-com entrepreneurs of the 1990s: There is no “new paradigm” in their industry. The most successful militants have recognized all along that certain basic rules — and operational practices — still apply. And for those who fail to grasp that reality, there will be a painful winnowing.

Cyberwarefare's conspicuity in the minds of Pentagon and intelligence strategists is evident by their acknowledgement of its threat in the 2008 Annual Threat Assessment [Download PDF.]

The US information infrastructure—including telecommunications and computer networks and systems, and the data that reside on them—is critical to virtually every aspect of modern life. Therefore, threats to our IT infrastructure are an important focus of the Intelligence Community. As government, private sector, and personal activities continue to move to networked operations, as our digital systems add ever more capabilities, as wireless systems become even more ubiquitous, and as the design, manufacture, and service of information technology has moved overseas, our vulnerabilities will continue to grow.

Our information infrastructure—including the internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers in critical industries—increasingly is being targeted for exploitation and potentially for disruption or destruction, by a growing array of state and non-state adversaries. Over the past year, cyber exploitation activity has grown more sophisticated, more targeted, and more serious. The Intelligence Community expects these trends to continue in the coming year.

We assess that nations, including Russia and China, have the technical capabilities to target and disrupt elements of the US information infrastructure and for intelligence collection.  Nation states and criminals target our government and private sector information networks to gain competitive advantage in the commercial sector. Terrorist groups—including al-Qa’ida, HAMAS, and Hizballah—have expressed the desire to use cyber means to target the United States. Criminal elements continue to show growing sophistication in technical capability and targeting, and today operate a pervasive, mature on-line service economy in illicit cyber capabilities and services available to anyone willing to pay.

Each of these actors has different levels of skill and different intentions; therefore, we must develop flexible capabilities to counter each. It is no longer sufficient for the US Government to discover cyber intrusions in its networks, clean up the damage, and take legal or political steps to deter further intrusions. We must take proactive measures to detect and prevent intrusions from whatever source, as they happen, and before they can do significant damage. (p. 16)

As did the Pentagon’s 2008 Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China [Download PDF].

In the past year, numerous computer networks around the world including those owned by the U.S. Government were subject to intrusions that appear to have originated within the PRC. These intrusions require many of the skills and capabilities that would also be required for computer network attack. Although it is unclear if these intrusions were conducted by, or with the endorsement of, the PLA or other elements of the PRC government, developing capabilities for cyberwarfare is consistent with authoritative PLA writings on this subject.

In 2007, the Department of Defense, other U.S. Government agencies and departments, and defense-related think tanks and contractors experienced multiple computer network intrusions, many of which appeared to originate in the PRC (Sec 1:4)

"Non-Contact” Warfare: An example of China’s current thinking on asymmetric warfare is encapsulated by a military theory termed ”non-contact” which seeks to attain a political goal by looking for auxiliary means beyond military boundaries or limits. Examples include: cyberwarfare against civilian and military networks – especially against communications and logistics nodes; fifth column attacks, including sabotage and subversion, attacks on financial infrastructure; and, information operations. (Sec 1:21)

According to Stratfor, “The United States has a very impressive ability to function in and command cyberspace. But by no means does it enjoy the unquestioned military dominance it enjoys in so many other domains." Hence the creation of the Air Force Cyber Command and the organizational shift this asymmetric threat precipitates:

Mastery of cyberspace is essential to America’s national security. Controlling cyberspace is the prerequisite to effective operations across all strategic and operational domains—securing freedom from attack and freedom to attack.  (Air Force Cyber Threat Vision Statement [Download PDF], Sec 2: II)

The endemic vagueness surrounding statistics and other financial indicators for the creative industries, especially in the media and entertainment sector, are symptomatic of our archaic attitudes about the role creativity has in our local and national economies. A trend toward solving that vagueness is emergent as economic development is increasingly dependent in the West on intellectual properties and creative industries. This movement is an ongoing outcome of business, new technology, and generational shifts/consumer shifts and not a "social movement" constructed by any party per se.

For example, on the service end:

"Decades of experience, creativity, and growth have made film production and distribution one of the most economically important industries in the United States," notes the 2001 U.S. Department of Commerce Report on Runaway Production, "[u]nfortunately, our official statistics are woefully deficient." Current available data does not offer a precise picture of employment numbers for the full rage of professions involved in motion picture production or, for that matter, consistent measures of the industry's economic impact both regionally and nationally. Data available for production days and budgets is primarily collected by local film commissions and prone to irregularities and inaccuracies by default of naturally occurring idiosyncrasies in the measures and classifications used by those organizations.

In the absence of incentives or common effective measures, figures used are often volunteered by production companies and, therefore, in-auditable or even suspect. According to one film commissioner I spoke with, volunteered figures do not necessarily reflect actual monies spent in one's own region, especially when a production crosses state lines. In those cases, revenues accounted for in one state may be simultaneously accounted for in another state's revenue totals. Obtaining aggregate data at the national level is even more difficult.

In terms of overall economic model:

Outside the specificity of film production, we may have begun to rectify our overall fiscal vagueness about the creative industries with the recent adoption of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) that replaces the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system originally devised in the 1930s. The SIC system, although periodically updated throughout the last century, structured our economy on an obsolete industrially driven model. The NAICS identifies hundreds of new, emerging, and advanced technology industries, while reorganizing industry into more meaningful sectors--especially in the service-producing segments of the economy.

Then in terms of advertising:

The growing price and waning influence of advertising expenditure on mainstream television channels is a serious issue for many advertisers today. Intolerance about wasted ad spending is mounting. ROI is the today's advertising catch phrase. The linkage gap between producers and consumers of non-subscription broadcast content amounts to failure of means for assessing consumer preference with suppliers and network television was chosen by thirty-two percent of respondents as the worst medium for proving ROI, according to a study by Advertising Age.

Advertising, long the main revenue source for much of the media industry, is rapidly moving to the Internet, and shown by the financial success of sites like Yahoo! and Google. This is part of the trend in advertising from "mass" marketing to "measurable" marketing. The interactivity of the Internet is driving the process of fragmentation for broadcasters, but has the potential to provide advertisers with information about the taste, preferences, and habits of consuming audiences. So the Internet offers advertisers a valuable advantage that mass media cannot provide.

Entertainment financials:

Many commentators have noted how inefficiently Hollywood does business. A studio will spend millions of dollars marketing a particular star in lieu of having its own brand only to toss that brand away at conclusion of a project. There is no question that media and entertainment are by nature risky. What I am suggesting is that there is a slow evolution towards efficiency measures in the media firm and entertainment firm business models. So for example, gaming firms reuse code from failed titles instead of starting from scratch with every title. Digital technology allows for greater fluidity and quantification in distribution, for example: In d-cinema the ticketing systems are integrated into the pre-show systems and concession stands, so business can see clearly what is working and what does not.

In the social consciousness:

Americans are generally oblivious to the economic benefit of media and entertainment. The industry is often viewed as glamorous when in fact it is also anything but that. So much of the discussion, in my view, is overly politicized by both the left and right: "Hollywood is destroying America!" or "Advertising is destroying art by commodifying it." What I aim to do is open up a space for discussion that looks at these matters in context.

As media and entertainment follow an R&D model, like oil exploration and pharmaceuticals; I thought the article below was interesting in light of my thoughts above about the increasing trend towards efficiencies in the creative industries. 

Fundamental to solving creative inefficiencies is understanding the nature of the creative process, in as much as it is developing models or solutions that make those processes profitable and capable of sustained duplication.

So the solution lies as much in developing models, as it does in understanding the limitations of those models...

FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT - Lunch with the FT: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“There is a lot more randomness in biotechnology and any form of medical discovery. The role of design is overestimated. Every time we plan on trying to find a drug we don’t because it closes our mind. How are we discovering drugs? From the side-effects of other drugs.” Researchers very often “change their story” when they discover something by accident to give the impression it was by design.

 'Creative cultural-crossover content' is media and entertainment content that not only captures international markets of indigenous and emigrant Southeast Asian, Chinese, Indian, or Middle Eastern audiences, made accessible at home and abroad by the proliferation of world-wide cable and other global media distributors; but also, international media and entertainment content that incorporates and exploits the creative narratives and styles of developing regions and repackages them to an emergent mainstream Western audience that is made up primarily of members of the game generation – i.e., age thirty-five and under.

Unlike their predecessors, these younger electronic media consumers are more likely to digest cross-cultural creative content - for example, Japanese anime – as automatically and un-selfconsciously as they would their own.   In fact, for this demographic, international content, is viewed as more 'original' than 'foreign'; because, as authors John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade have pointed out in their study of the effects of the game generation ethos on the culture of business, this birth cohort takes both globalization and the consumption of electronic media and socialization in all its forms automatically.   In other words, they look at globalization from the viewpoint of the valley rather than the hill top, and they also view electronic media as an extension of themselves and their own culture - even if that interplay is couched in a verisimilitudinous role-play with their foreign counter-parts.

Here is an example of such a crossover vehicle.

"Last season, FRONTLINE/World ran a story from the Middle East that introduced viewers to the fastest selling comic book in the Arab world, The 99. The comic features characters with super powers based on the concept of Allah's 99 attributes, including wisdom and generosity, as taught in the Koran. Its creator, Naif al-Mutawa, is a 36-year-old from Kuwait who was educated in the United States and who, as a boy, devoured Marvel comics and the Hardy Boys mysteries."

Link to Frontline Program on 'The 99':

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2008/01/indonesia_wham.html

Though not well known, there exists a dynamic cross-fertilization between media, entertainment and defense technology: i.e., military surveillance, targeting, and weapons systems use technology that was developed primarily for motion pictures and entertainment software. In fact, the U.S. government currently employs Panavision's 300x compound zoom lens for military surveillance; and according to an interview I conducted for The Second Sight (http://www.alexaobrien.com/TheSecondSight) with Bob Harvey, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Panavision, federal contracts with the U.S. State Department are the fastest growing segment of Panavision's business.

More provocative is how Hollywood and video games drive the development of high-speed, high-resolution digital image capture, management, transmission, and display that have implications for fields where these advanced technological applications would be economically unviable to develop on their own. Entertainment software has lead to faster introduction and deployment of processors, broadband networks, and high definition disks like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. But, "IBM places value on chips made for entertainment software that goes beyond revenue and profits," says Dr. John Kelly, senior vice president and group executive for IBM Technology Group: "These chips help drive technology in other areas." The Mercury Computer's CELL based blade server, for example, can handle the requirements of sonar and radar computation for military or scientific applications, because of its ability to process real time data streams. "The Cell BE processor was originally designed for the volume home entertainment market," says Craig Lund, chief technology officer of Mercury Computer Systems, "but its architecture of nine heterogeneous on-chip cores is well-suited to the type of distributed, real-time processing that will power tomorrow's digital battlefield."

If the U.S. military is the primary global military power, and this hegemony is based on the ability of the U.S. Navy to dominate the world's oceans, then the condition of hegemony is partially based on the superior numbers and technology of U.S. naval vessels and augmented significantly by U.S. dominance in space-based reconnaissance technology, made possible by entertainment software consumers and movie goers world-wide.

Most Americans, however, are oblivious to the considerable role that content industries play in job and wealth creation - not only in terms of regional economic development and growing high-tech industry, but also in terms of U.S. global economic competitiveness:

• In fact, the media, entertainment, and cultural copyright sectors create new jobs at a rate three times faster than the remaining economy. In 2002, these sectors employed 5.48 million workers and accounted for six percent of U.S. gross domestic product. These sectors also generated $89.26 billion in export revenue - surpassing every other category including automotive, aviation, agricultural, as well as chemical and allied products.

• Foreign sales of motion pictures alone totaled $17 billion in 2002. The motion picture industry is the only U.S. sector that boasts a surplus balance of trade with every other country in the world; and the international sale of filmed entertainment plays a significant role in our nation's overall trade surplus in services.

• U.S. sales of entertainment software also totaled $8.2 billion in 2004, and U.S. game designers exported an additional $2.1 billion the same year. Deutsche Bank forecasts that global revenue for game software will grow at thirteen percent annually over the next four years, while PricewaterhouseCooper projects that the U.S. media and entertainment industries will be worth $690 billion by 2009.

This development has hastened the transformation of the U.S. economy from one based largely on information and knowledge to one driven principally by creativity. John Howkins categorizes the creative economy to include fifteen creative sectors - such as research and development, software, design, and content industries like film, music, and video games - that produce intellectual property in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks and proprietary designs. The annual global revenue for Howkin's fifteen identified sectors was $2.24 trillion in 1999. The U.S. share represents forty percent of the market with revenue totaling $960 billion. The U.S. share also accounts for more than forty percent of research and development, forty percent of television and radio, and thirty percent of film. Howkins calculates that core copyright industries will be worth $6.1 trillion internationally in fifteen years. U.S. dominance in these segments - more than productivity improvements related to new technology and new manufacturing methods - is responsible for much of the nation's global economic competitiveness since the nineteen-eighties.

The Second Sight Podcast, © 2007 Alexa D. O'Brien, (27:52)

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The Second Sight offers insight and analysis on the media and entertainment industry - an often misunderstood or mischaracterized sector of the American economic and cultural landscape in the midst of its own technological and cultural shifts - from globalization and the emerging creative economy; to digital technology and the evolving aesthetic and nature of content; to the growing technological cross fertilization between media, defense, and medicine.

My name is Alexa D. O'Brien Gault. For the next two months, we will focus our attention towards understanding the evolving nature of the below-the-line training cycle for motion picture technicians, in the face of both digital technologies and newer end to end digital workflows; and the coming of age, so to speak, of the game generation - the older cusp of which, now in their mid thirties, having finally entered their productive years as journeymen technicians and content creators.

Jendra Jarnagin is one of a handful of New York based directors of photography who has shot with the Viper. She has over thirteen years of professional shooting and lighting experience, and her cinematography credits include numerous commercials and over thirty short films. She also worked as a lighting technician on major Hollywood films and episodic television, such as "Sex and the City" and "Law and Order". Jendra recently collaborated on the recent Alexis Krasilovsky documentary, Women Behind the Camera, featuring interviews with camerawomen from all over the world. Jendra Jarnagin, shot, field produced, and directed the projects New York interviews: including Ellen Kuras, ASC; Sandi Sissel, ASC; Lisa Rinzler; and Giselle Chamma. I am pleased to have Jendra Jarnagin for a Second Sight Podcast interview. Welcome.

Jendra Jarnagin

Thank you.

Alexa D. O'Brien

Tell me about Women Behind the Camera.

Jendra Jarnagin

Women Behind the Camera is a feature length documentary that has interviews...I think they interviewed over eighty women from all over the world. I am not sure the final count in the edit. Cinematographers, documentarians, journalists, camera operators, even some camera assistants...about their jobs in different countries and partly of course some of it deals with being a woman in that job.

Viacom Asks YouTube to Remove Clips - New York Times

In a sign of the growing tension between old-line media and the new Internet behemoths, Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, demanded yesterday that YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming...

The dispute underscored the tense dance that major media companies are doing with Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion last October. Google hopes to strike deals that will give it the rights to mainstream programming and also wipe away its potential liability for any violations of copyright law by YouTube so far...

YouTube is supported by advertising, but in most cases it does not share that revenue with copyright holders.

These developments are important to note, but the following comment jumped out at me and formed a synergy of thought about intellectual property and property rights in an age where the frontier no longer exists and natural resources of the world have become scarce.

"They choose not to filter out copyrighted content, " said the spokesman, Carl D. Folta. He added that the company apparently had the technology to filter out pornography and hateful material, which is rarely seen on YouTube.

It is no secret that totalitarian governments like the one in China use filtering software designed and sold by western companies, headquartered in liberal democracies. 

I am not suggesting that Google’s use of filtering software in the context of this New York Time’s article is totalitarian.  It’s not.  The thoughts that flowed within me after reading the article and which will follow do not directly relate to the content of the article itself.

NB I do know Google's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party is complicit when Google agreed to filter the Internet in order to secure their place in the oxymoronic "opening" of the Chinese market(s).  Who knows? I suspect they rationalize that their decision to do so is part of China's long term transition to liberal democracy brought about by the eventual increase in the economic and consequent political power or the Chinese middle class: in other words, a slow revolution or political evolution.  That model is certainly documented in human history.  I hope they are right.

In terms of any technology, for example, it is not the knowledge of how to split the atom that creates ill, it is the contextual use of technology that creates both good and evil. 

More to my ultimate point, I was more struck by the description of the filtering technology's application and the way in which its reference in the article further illuminated to me my own age and its philosophical dilemmas. 

Perhaps, the mention of filtering technology describe within reminded me of how its benign application for Google could be used in other contexts.  Certainly, Viacom has the right to protect its intellectual property however it wishes.  But what about this notion of intellectual property and ideas itself, the life blood our political and economic discourse?

The rise of fundamentalism and the changing post "Cold War" world order has been studied and described by others more accomplished than me, including Samuel P. Huntington in his "Foreign Affairs" essay and then book, The Clash of Civilizations. 

News, media and politics are interdependent organisms...and certainly many political scientists focus on their relationship to one another both in terms of the political cycle of nation states (elections), but also their political economy, in other worlds the market place.  The West increasingly depends on sectors like entertainment, research and development, and defense for its continued economic growth, and its overall political economy is direct responsibility for much of the West’s political stability and power.

We live in an age where entertainment and defense are curious bedfellows.  For example, entertainment software, as I have said elsewhere on this site, drives the technological development of the processors used by the defense sector. 

I have never heard anyone, however, flesh out the dilemma of Locke's notion of property rights in his "Second Treatise on Nature" (the philosophical underpinning of our own democratic republic is this notion of property rights) vis a vis intellectual or abstract property rights, central themselves to our creative economy, the underpinning of the West's continued economic growth. 

When intellectual property becomes the central driver of our economy, as it has, and the organs of information that distribute that property are consolidated (as they naturally are.  See Creatonomics), what does this mean for the average citizen?  For those who poo poo these ideas as too high brow for the mass, or somehow separate mass culture from the philosophical debates of our time, I say, “Forget the forest or the trees, you, my friend, are missing ecosystem of the forest.”  

Will our citizen own his plot of land in the media and entertainment landscape, or will he be forced to rent space from the company owned tenement, distribute his goods by the company owned railroad, and buy his supplies from the company owned store?  What does self-protection, natural to Locke’s notion of natural rights mean for the individual and social group within society? 

More importantly, the growing factionalism of our political discourse and the ceaseless polemics of extremist ideas are not simply a rehashing of polemics from times before.  These extreme polemics are manifest because of the underlying conflict and philosophical dilemmas of our time, the repercussions of which are experienced through every organ of society, including its central organs of information and ideas, mass media, entertainment, and art.

There is no save haven or neutral space for the tolerant in a world with less resources and no frontier to escape to.  This is the philosophical dilemma of our age and we must understand the dilemma as such.  Our liberal democracy depends upon it.  Our economic innovation, which drives our nation’s wealth, also depends upon that neutral and open space.   

The role of art, information, propaganda, and communication are the new frontier and the battleground in our ‘New World of Information’.  Is there an alternative to the increasing space that extremist polemics take up in our nation’s intellectual life? Any alternative must ultimately float the complex tensions of political correctness and fundamental secularism that is equally damaging, in my opinion, to the fabric of our society.  

Understanding these questions is the work of my generation and those living whose experience and wisdom can guide our society’s safe passage.  There are always consequences, even to inaction, so the focus of those who are interested need not be filled with petitions for the lazy. 

When the pilgrims came to North America, they were escaping religious persecution in the Old World.  A war of ideas is not new to human history, the epoch that we are in, however, is critical to the very existence of those organisms that we take for granted in the West. 

I continue to look to the former dissidents of eastern bloc countries, like the former Czechoslovakian, Vaclav Havel, 'playwright and antipolitican' later president of the democratic Czech Republic, for insight into the post-modern world order. 

For example, Havel wrote in the 1981 in his famous essay the "Power of the Powerless” about the post totalitarian state: where ideology is the tyrant (not the Politburo) and how the line of complicity runs through each citizen, including the grocer who puts up his seemingly benign poster which states, "Workers of the World Unite".   

All of us live in interesting times, but those of us involved in media have a tremendous responsibility for those who come after us.  I look forward to investigating and understanding these questions myself and in the timely work of my generation and others more capable and experienced than me.    More on these ideas later.

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It's been over a month since my last blog entry. For penance, I promise to watch FoxFaith's new Christian thriller, Thr3e. As Jeff Shannon of the Seattle PI writes, "If 'Thr3e' is any indication of what we can expect from the emerging trend of studio-funded faith-based movies, we may find ourselves wishing "The Passion of the Christ" had been a box-office bomb." Have faith Jeff!

But the real penance would not be complete if I did not take a lesson from Fox's Murdoch on "market retention". What, pray tell, do I mean? As Joanne Ostrow put it, the same cynical Hollywood "where plastic surgery is considered a sacrament" has now found that Christianity sells.

As some of you may know, I split time between Charleston, South Carolina and New York City. Yesterday, I received a direct mail post card from the FoxFaith company itself. Obviously, I wasn't in New York. I raise the point only to re-emphasize (see here and here.) the brilliance of Fox News Corp., who discovered "long tail" marketing years before the term was ever coined by Chris Anderson. Rupert Murdoch, " Me love you long tail."

Where other media firms (Pixar and Disney excluded) have relinquished their brand to stars, Fox has not only retained its brand, it continues to exploit it for it's own gain. You may have a political bone to pick with Fox News, but only because you are aware of their branding. This company understands market retention. This idea is actually quite foreign for many media firms in an age of disposability. Most corporate strategies emphasize market "capture" but not "retention." Fox News Corp. understands both.

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Before I left for vacation last month, I sketch out for you my undigested thoughts on the emerging aethetics of the game generation (35 and under):  there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because these kids are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.

Today Patricia Winters Lauro writes in the New York Times that

[s]traight direct-response pitches hardly ever work anymore, and increasingly agencies have turned to spoofing their own industry to attract viewers long enough to deliver a new message...Direct-response advertising as a genre is especially appealing to parody because it’s “so cheesy,” Mr. Jendrysik said. It is an inside joke that the public gets, he added, even the GameTap target audience of 25- to 35-year-olds, who may be too young to recall the ’70s pioneers like Ronco, K-Tel or Ginsu knives.

Mr. Jendrysik said the spoofs were also a good strategic fit for GameTap, which was introduced nationally last year and is trying to build its subscription base.

I will not have access to the Internet between November 4th and the 18th, because I will be traveling on a sail boat from Grenada to Antigua. Please excuse the blog interruption.

I leave you for the time being with my undigested thoughts on the broad and relevant topic “the evolving nature and aesthetics of creative content”.

First, it covers the evolving structures of storytelling via new media. Examples of new media structures are foureyedmonsters.com and lonelygirl15.com; and interactive television content that is created on the web to supplement traditional shows. Reality TV is obviously interactive but LOST is the best original dramatic example of this interactivity; and then of course, their is the growth of user generated content from channels like YouTube and CNN): What do these new storytelling structures look like? How are these structures similar and different to their predecessors?

Television, can have a relationship with the internet that film cannot. I imagine that the nature of going to the movies will still demand High Imaging that allows for suspension of disbelief...but there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because they are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.

Another thought, I think of Mark Chiolis’ (Grass Valley) remark to me in my interview with him:

"Today there are a number of thought provoking questions that are being asked. What happens when there is a true RGB 4k (there isn't one today) sensor that rivals, if not exceeds, that of today's film stock? One of the arguments for film is that people like the "look" which includes the grain and movement through the gate. What happens when the "game-boy" generation takes over? Having grown up with "video" is this the "look" they want to see? Will they have a different set of standards to compare to?"

Film (theatrical features) is (are) different. I think they will demand even more heighten realism and I suspect that Digital 3D will become increasingly popular in that format in the years to come (an outgrowth of the gamers demand for a heightened experience).

What are the fundamental relationships that the younger generation seem to be exploring via this new media content and traditional content? Some may say the subject matter is generally solipsistic, passive - an outgrowth perhaps of the individuals solitary communion with the anonymous web or with media itself...but look at the bleeding edge technology and science of virtual reality. Look at the studies of the psycho-physical effects of these media tools on users in medical and defense research. Passive is not the right word to describe this relationship. Interactive is better. But with what (media) and whom (other players)?

I say one cannot understand this generation unless they have a MySpace page and love it. Why? There is a freedom of movement in the field of archetype and symbol that enables both artist and audience to observe without disclosure, absorb without acquisition, and create without the demand for conclusion. The repetition of archetypical representation uncovers both artist's and audience's collective mythologies, thereby revealing: The anonymous is personal.

Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.”

How have television and new media influenced the sensibility and subject matter of creative content. I see the primary relationship that the younger generation is exploring, is with the media itself (I am not talking about the news media, I am talking about media itself). You may critiqued the passivity of video games...but, perhaps that passivity masks an exploration with identity that is not understood by non-participants and therefore disregarded as irrelevant. I say this exploration is powerful and emergent in movies like Adaptation and I Heart Huckabees. This relationship between identity and media is increasingly portrayed as mystical, interactive, and “high touch”. Their is a propensity for role playing, a desire for authenticity coupled with a disdain of truthiness and even traditional ideology. For dramatic content and docu-reality, they create satire and even sarcasm (the mass may also create cynicism, but I would never characterize this generation as cynical. They know the line of complicity runs through each of them).

In some respects, “reality shows” seem like an outgrowth of this propensity for role-playing, a study of the dramas of personality. In deconstructing the “sit com” and “documentary” and even the “commercial brand”, there appears to be an investigation of topics like truth and being.

Regarding lonelygirl15.com. As one writer I spoke with remarked, “Entertainment is always flirting with reality. It seems that things that don't aim to be thought of as real do a much better job. Verisimilitude, it's what it's all about."

Is there a common thread in the subject and structures explored by newer creative content, a post-post modern sensibility? See the NYT’s article, “Brand Underground”:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/magazine/30brand.html?ex=1311912000&en=82edb890b1d6c977&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach for example. One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 35 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of a corporate mandate (well, except their own). Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system. Hand me the cyanide, the revolution is over and we lost!

Boomers are wired to view creativity as a choice between “selling out” or “sticking it to the man” and the quest for the great society as a dogmatic battle between the mediocrity of relativism and the virtue of absolutes. To use former bohemian terminology, today’s generation does not have that hang up. “They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes David Brooks, “because this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” The suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. “The total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”

I am a broken record, but like dissident antipoliticians from the former Czechoslovakia, who used satire and absurdity to highlight the fact that in a postmodern consumer society the “line of complicity runs through each of us," this new American generation distrusts political grandstanding and even traditional forms of organized politics. Hence, the popularity of so-called no brow satires like South Park, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show.

The playwright Heiner Mueller once remarked that the potency of theater in his native East Germany was based on the absence of other ways of getting messages across to people. "As a result," Mueller says, "Theater here has taken over the function of other media in the West," before now. While the never ending surface chatter of talking points and double speak on both the left and the right continue to erode the value of words, they also inflate the space between the lines.

None of this mentions how the game generation take globalization for granted and the growing crossover of cultural content from other traditions, “bollywood”, Japanese Anime et cetera.

The Second Sight Podcast, © 2006 Alexa D. O'Brien, (26:35)

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The Second Sight offers insight and analysis on the media and entertainment industry - an often misunderstood or mischaracterized sector of the American economic and cultural landscape in the midst of its own technological and cultural shifts - from globalization and the emerging creative economy; to digital technology and the evolving aesthetic and nature of content; to the growing technological cross fertilization between media, defense, and medicine.

My name is Alexa D. O'Brien Gault. For the next two months, we will focus our attention towards understanding the evolving nature of the below-the-line training cycle for motion picture technicians, in the face of both digital technologies and newer end to end digital workflows; and the coming of age, so to speak, of the game generation - the older cusp of which, now in their mid thirties, having finally entered their productive years as journeymen technicians and content creators.

Today, we are talking with cameraperson, John Clemens. For seventeen years now, Clemens has ac'ed and operated for directors of photography like Lance Acord (Buffalo 66 and Lost in Translation). His most recent work with Acord was on a Mercedes Benz spot that Acord shot and directed. John has also worked with Joseph Yacoe, known for his commercial and music videos work. Clemens most recent job with Yacoe included a hair product commercial with Penelope Cruz. Director of photography, Darren Lew, who has shot commercials for the likes of Clinique, Versace, Nike, and Adidas, and who began his own career as a still assistant to renowned fashion photographer, Steven Meisel, has said of John Clemens:

"I have never worked with a camera assistant who had it more in his blood than John. He has got a sixth sense for focus and a working method of military precision and consistency, it is no wonder he works with the greatest DP's from all over the world. His skill goes beyond the technical--he quietly contributes to the art of camera work each time we work together everyone else becomes second best after working with John."

John Clemens' credits include Buffalo 66, Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, and Requiem for a Dream. I am honored to have John Clemens on the line for a Second Sight pod cast interview.

Alexa D. O'Brien Gault

Hi, John. How are you?

John Clemens

Good. How are you doing?

In his prescient and aptly titled book, The Rise of the Creative Class, urban planner Richard Florida identifies the emergence of a new economic and social class of "thirty eight million Americans roughly thirty percent of the entire U.S. workforce, whose creativity is the driving force of our nation's economic growth." [1]

This month we focus on understanding the evolving below-the-line training cycle and the newer end-to-end digital work flow as it relates to acquisition and post. The traditional training cycle of below-the-line technicians has slowly eroded over the last ten years. Now the older cusp of the game generation in their mid-thirties have recently entered their productive years as journeyman technicians and content creators. These technicians and artists came up in an infrastructure married to film but sleeping with video, an infrastructure infiltrated more and more by electronic acquisition and digital post - a result itself of the explosion of world wide cable and the desire to stem the rising cost of production. A corollary of this would also translate to the growing outsourcing of production and post, and the changing nature and aesthetic of content in the form of both docu-dramas, generated by professionals and users alike, and advanced CGI.

I remember having the opportunity to compare formative experiences with Dedo Wingert, inventor of the dedo light, at a lighting expo one rainy winter night in New York City in 2000. No one showed at the event except myself and a few other below-the-line technicians. This fact alone is important to note. One executive at a prominent rental house in New York City recently mentioned to me that attendance at seminars has been declining over the last few years. This phenomena, according to elder technicians, is evidence of the arrogance of today's younger generation. After listening to Wigert talk of his traditional film apprenticeship, I couldn't help but feel inadequate.

Ultimately, the generational myopia and phenomena alluded to above are symptomatic of larger forces and better understood in context: These are the advance of digital post and acquisition technologies, the evolution of the below-the-line training cycle and infrastructure, the emerging ethos of the game generation and its influence on culture and business, and finally both globalization and the creative economy as it relates to media and entertainment.

Today digital cinematography and digital end-to-end workflows are reaching critical mass. The culture war I came up in between film and "video" has given way to hybrid projects with newer digital formats that incorporate the best of both worlds. The change is liberating for me because I am a member of the game generation and the newer tools are more natural to my sensibilities, even as they complicate the creative process with an increase in variables that influence image quality along the digital supply chain.

Rather than inundate you with a dissertation on these matter I have decided to break my thoughts down and post them in easily digestible gruel (just kidding!) courses. By months end you shall understand why monkey brains are a delicacy. And lucky for you, the meal will be topped by an even better desert in the form of pod cast conversations with highly respected below-the-line technicians.

Here's are planned stops along the topic route:

I. The Creative Economy

II. Creativity is Expensive and Time Consuming

III. The Creative Factory - a. Globalization and Convergence, b. Outsourcing Production and Post

IV. The Horizontal Labor Market - a. Culture of Tradesmen vs. Culture of Technicians, b. Art at the fringe vs. Creativity as Mainstream

IV. The Cultural Ethos of The Game Generation - a. Generational Myopia and Culture War, b. Evolving Nature and Aesthetic of Content

V. The Digital Work Flow

Here is a summary of upcoming pieces in my four part series on digital technology and emergent media trends for 2006:

The second installment will focus on the changing nature of our industry’s below-the-line labor market vis-à-vis digital acquisition and post, and how newer technologies are transforming our industry’s culture and training cycle. I will illustrate how our industry is moving from a culture of apprenticeship to a culture of technicians, and how this development fits into the larger context of globalization and the creative economy.

The third piece will focus on growing demand for greater clarity and efficiency in the way that Hollywood and other creative industries do business. I see the viability of digital technology as part of an emerging trend in Hollywood towards solving the endemic vagueness around creative financials that are symptomatic of our outmoded ideas about creativity.

The fourth piece will focus on emerging markets and the changing nature of content that is resulting from these newer technologies and other generational and economic trends.

Cheers,

Alexa D. O'Brien