Recently in Cultural Cross-Over Content Category

This is of interest to me, here at The Second Sight, because in the media sector has an economic as well as social benefit that is often undervalued in the American consciousness.  Chris Anderson has already mentioned in his book The Long Tail, the similarly titled phenomenon of "the long tail of terrorism" is a result of digital technology and the proliferation of world wide cable and the internet that have made distribution of content more fluid.

September 2008, Stratfor posted intelligence and analysis on As-Sahab, al Quaeda's media branch:

Arab satellite news network Al Jazeera and an Islamist Web site aired previously unseen footage Sept. 7 of Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking al Qaeda leaders apparently planning the 9/11 attacks. The video, like most other recent ones of al Qaeda leaders, was produced by the jihadist network's As-Sahab media branch, the fairly new organization behind the network's latest media blitz. In fact, banner ads appearing on extremist Web sites claim the video is a trailer for an upcoming As-Sahab documentary on the 9/11 attacks.

The post goes on to explain the logistic challenges of media production for a jihadist organization shooting in remote locations with peculiar below the line security concerns for cameramen and other technicians who have close access to the core leadership. 

 

 

 '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

Advertising on internet soars as world follows British lead-Business-Money-Broadband-TimesOnline  Annotated

— Google unveils its first big assault on television today through a deal to supply adverts to EchoStar, the US satellite network. The internet giant will run auctions for advertising spots on channels such as Discovery, CNN and MTV, which are carried by EchoStar to 13 million US households.

"America has never been less influential, and nobody needs to understand that more than Americans."
-from Frontline World, "News War"

According to Greg Barker, the U.S. State Department has 30,000 employees, of that only twenty are fluent in Arabic and another 150 conversant. Television is as much entertainment as it is a weapon, and television networks complete for market share as much as they compete for political influence.

Assuming the trend toward long tail marketing comes about, effecting the growth of a plethora of content niches and fluid distribution, tell me, how will this effect the social dimension and disruptive factional power of art and ideas?

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).

"The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government." -Publius, Federalist No. 10, Federalist Papers

Cable television is undergoing worldwide expansion, especially in the Arab world. 

I have previously spoken on The Second Sight about "cultural crossover content", in other words, the growing market for, say Bollywood movies, in western countries including the United states - first from immigrant and first generation Indian Americans - followed by the trend towards becoming part of mainstream culture.   See NYT's article on the  red carpet, New York opening for the recent Bollywood release, Guru. American children take globalization for granted.  Japanese anime is as much a part of their pop culture as it is to children in Japan.

I firmly believe this trend towards "cultural crossover content" will increase as the game generation ages and media firms continue to exploit emerging foreign markets.  I have highlighted some of this under the catagory (of the same name) here at The Second Sight.

More specific to this entry's title, I was recently informed of a wonderful Arab media and entertainment link sahafa.com .  More on that market later.

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.

India: Asia's emerging economic superpower—Part 8

Excerpts:

"The first foreign-made silent movie was shown in India more than a hundred years ago in 1896. The venue was Mumbai (Bombay). The first domestic movie was produced there, and ever since Mumbai has become the center of movie production."

"With the advent of talkies, multilingual India developed a number of distinct movie industries, one for each major language spoken in the country."

"India has 16 official languages, but the influence of Bollywood cinema was instrumental in making Hindi the common language for the whole of India."

"The Tamil film industry (known as “Kollywood”) based in Chennai (Madras) and the Bengali film industry based in Kolkata (Calcutta) are also booming. India is a movie superpower, producing the world’s largest number of films, about 800 every year. Of those, more than 30 percent are Bollywood films, and about 20 percent are from competitor Kollywood."

Bollywood dreams grow bigger : HindustanTimes.com

For several months, I have mentioned the growing swell of interest in cultural cross over content between the U.S. and Bollywood.  Saibal Chatterjee gives us the run down of the latest deals and production slates for co-productions between the two largest movie markets:

Excerpts:

For years, the Bollywood production sector has been laying claims to imaginary global conquests.

[A] couple of Mumbai film production houses seek to expand their universe by going in for tie-ups with important Hollywood players.

MySpace cowboys - September 4, 2006

Most likely fresh from reading Joe Studwell's China Dream, an anonymous Hollywood executive was quoted by LA Times writer Bruce Wallace in December 2005, saying, "People have been waiting for China to open up since Marco Polo."  " It is wrong...to assume that just because the Communist Party is slowly relaxing its grip over its markets that China will someday become an open media market. 'People forget...It's not just a Communist Party thing. It's a Chinese cultural thing.'"  China will never buy from you.  They'll copy your IP and sell it to their own markets. 

In the same article Wallace goes on to say:

Rupert Murdoch, who in early 2004 gave a speech proclaiming that "the potential for China to become a new global center for media and entertainment is slowly becoming more real." By last September, one month after Beijing's decision to re-tighten regulatory controls on foreign media, Murdoch was publicly lamenting that News Corp.'s China business had hit a "brick wall." When it came to foreign media, he complained, China's political leadership was "quite paranoid about what gets through."

All this reminds me of what Simon Cowell remarked to Larry King in March this year 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.

I am not a China believer, yet.  AP reports on Chinese TV stations rampant piracy.

Chinese filmmakers accuse TV stations of film piracy

Excerpts:

BEIJING — Chinese moviemakers are accusing Chinese TV stations of becoming part of the nation's thriving movie piracy industry.The Chinese Movie Copyright Association says TV stations here air up to 1,500 pirated Chinese movies a year, costing studios up to $9.4 million in lost revenues, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday.

Indiantelevision.com's interview with UTV Founder & CEO Ronnie Screwvala

Excerpts:

UTV founder-promoter Ronnie Screwvala has shown again and again that he is a smart dealmaker. He got a string of private equity funds and News Corp. to invest in his TV content company which had successfully expanded into a diversified media model

But nothing can get him more excited than the latest deal he cut out with Walt Disney. The buyout of Hungama TV ($30.5 million) and a 14.9 per cent stake in UTV ($14 million) has given him the potential to build a war chest of Rs 5 billion. "In media, that offers lots of opportunities," he says.

On Screwvala's expansion plate is not just movies and animation but also new media content including gaming. The fun, as he says, is playing in a bigger field.

In an interview with Indiantelevision.com's Sibabrata Das, Screwvala talks of the business model he has carved out for UTV's second phase of growth and the script his company plans to write with Walt Disney.

East West Magazine - India Ink

Digital trail on silver screen

Excerpts:

Hrithik Roshan’s latest flick, Krish seems to have opened a new digital window for Bollywood. As it mopped up Rs 70 crore in the first week of release – considered the biggest opening in the history of Indian cinema – it is leaving a trail behind.

Analysts predict a big part of tinsel town’s growth, expected to touch Rs 15,000 crore by 2010, will come from digital cinema and multiplex boom in the country.

MySpace a launch pad for next-gen media biz

Business Standard - Disney in India

MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION HOSTS LANDMARK FILMMAKING WORKSHOP IN CHINA [PDF]

Excerpt:

"Beginning, Sunday, March 19, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) will host an intensive filmmaking workshop aimed at helping encourage and refine the sills of 40 Chinese producers and screenwriters...'Our goal in organizing these workshops in Beijing is to work with SARFT to help the local film industry work toward realizing the potential of a successful, legitimate film market that to date, has largely remained untapped."