“No,” Higgins replies, “It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?” Turner is indignant, offering a brisk reply: “Ask them.” As viewers, we are meant to enjoy Turner’s indignation, to identify with him and his idealism.

Higgins, who acts as the film’s most explicit realist – the tension between idealism and realism is one of the key themes of the movie – dismisses the sentiment. For a brief moment, it looks like Higgins and his conspirators are on the verge of eliminating Turner’s meddling. That’s the plan, at any rate, but Turner has what he believes to be an Ace up his sleeve, and an idealist Ace at that. He’s given the whole story of the conspiracy to the New York Times: “I told ‘em a story,” he says to Higgins. “You play games. I… told ‘em a story.” Higgins looks sad, perhaps even a bit disturbed: “Oh you… you poor, dumb son of a bitch. You’ve done more damage than you know.” Turner responds, loftily, “I hope so,” and begins to walk away.

A moment of silent tension passes before Higgins offers one last rejoinder: “Hey Turner – how do you know they’ll print it? You can take a walk… but how far if they don’t print it?” Then it’s Turner’s turn to exhibit doubt, etched all over a close-up of Redford’s face, before asserting, lamely, desperately: “They’ll print it.” Higgins repeats the question: “How do you know?”

And so the film comes to a close, with “How do you know?” left hanging over the proceedings, unsettling the audience’s perceptions of Turner’s success. At least, that was likely the final lesson to be had by audiences back in the early 70s, when the film was released. Back then, the monopolies of knowledge that restricted publishing, and that could thus conspire to hide “the truth,” were real concerns for those who wanted to know what was “really” going on. Back then, conspiracies worked through a logic of informational scarcity. On the one side of the ledger were agents in the know, behind the scenes, and their information gave them powers and agency beyond the plebes they governed or reported to. On the other side were the protagonists, information seekers, who by peeling back the veil of secrecy and the decoding of secret messages gained modest glimpses into the harsh world of full information. In such a way the conspiracy was revealed, but never quite fully, since the protagonist was constantly struggling against the limits of what they could know.

There’s something quaint to this setup, something antediluvian. Joe Turner uncovers the conspiracy, we should remember, by reading a rather eccentric thriller. It’s kind of charming to think that once upon a time a novel would offer a receptive and engaged mind the opportunity to uncover the secrets of the geopolitical universe.

Today we are confronted by a vastly different epistemological structure. Instead of a paucity of information, cleverly hidden within the books and magazines that are now dying media, we have a flood of information, constituted by a functionally infinite combination of 24 hr news networks, talk radio stations, millions upon millions of blogs, tweets, status updates, check-ins, tumblrs, and more. The barriers to publishing no longer exist. We are, as Hansen aptly describes it, in a storyteller uprising. We play games, too, but we also “tell ‘em a story.” And no one anymore can seriously wonder, given the ease of publishing and distribution, “how do you know they’ll print it?”

No, from the churning seas of post Web 2.0 productivity arises a different question. If everything can be printed, covered, discussed, tweeted, and more: how do we know they’ll see it? Or more seriously, how do we know they’ll care about it if they do see it? We spend a lot of time talking about analytics, and a lot of time talking up the principles of good story-telling, and we do so because of a fairly fundamental anxiety, one that we could summarize as follows: if a story falls in the social media forest, and no one cares enough to pay attention to it, does it really fall at all?

It is in this context that I want to recall Mike Daisey’s mildly fabricated (maybe “enhanced” is more kind) dramatic divination of Apple’s manufacturing practices. On the one hand, Daisey’s theatrical story ends up diverting focus from the very topic it addresses. When a story like that has its excesses and exaggerations exposed – and with these kinds of stories, they’re always exposed eventually – it becomes the object of the story in a way that the truth-tellers among us dislike. We hear more about Daisey, about falsehood, about deceit, than we do about the story’s remaining kernel of veracity, and as a result smug PR spokespersons can nod knowingly, with the right hint of a frown, and cast the original story into the annals of journalistic disrepute. In so doing, an “enhanced” story like Daisey’s “Agony and the Ecstasy” lets its subject-matter off the hook. A shame.

And yet, on the other hand, it’s not like the subject matter was actually being addressed; it’s not as if Daisey sabotaged a groundswell of concern that would have continued, unabated, if only he hadn’t interfered. No, our illustrious mainstream media, our industry-happy tech journalists, and we, the somnambulist users, don’t really spend much time thinking about all the messy industrial capitalism that these technologies rely upon. That’s not to suggest we’re ignorant or vapid. In reality, we all know that the manufacturing of our most cherished handheld electronic goods requires an incredibly complex and toxic (in terms of the environment and human well-being) manufacturing process, but we tend to maintain our enjoyment of these devices by not worrying too much about how they arrived on the shelves. Indeed, one could make the claim (hardly scandalous) that the hallmark of good technological design today is precisely its capacity to induce a happy mix of disregard and amnesia regarding the process by which the device was constructed, as well as the eventual fate of that device once replaced by something newer. Good design lets us enjoy forgetting these material realities, or at least pretending we’ve forgotten.

Maybe, then, this is where story-telling really comes to possess a power in the post-social media age. Today, with new narratives and new media that work outside the traditionally structured constraints on presentation (word limits, equal time, verifiability, lack of bias), we can tell stories and conduct a sort of new journalism that seeks attention for topics not with the hand of truth, but with the sleight of hand of exaggeration. Perhaps truth has become, well, boring. Social media have made our information consumption increasingly hedonistic, and it seems, well, unseemly to condemn those that feed our appetites through “enhancements” if in so doing they also force us to remember, if only for a while, that there is a very complicated and often horrifying reality to the systems behind and before our favorite screens.

Which means, in many ways, that Daisey can be seen as far more a champion of the truth than those who retracted their support for his work.

But seriously, though: doesn’t EVERYONE know about the Nyan Cat Video? Guess not. Anyhoo, the lovely people at The Fine Bros. came up with the idea of showing Nyan Cat to a set of people in their 60s and 70s, and recording their responses. The first of their “Elders React” series, it is buckets-o-fun–a lot of the responses are what one would expect, but there are some surprises, and a couple of pithy statements about modern meme culture.

I *heart* the lady in pink, and want to take her out to coffee.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The temptation to view mobile as “just another screen” for content delivery is strong. However, mobile is unique: it’s personal, it’s urgent, and for many consumers, it’s on 24/7. How do you earn the right to digital real estate on your audiences’ mobile devices?

To answer this question, let’s consider what three experts in this emerging space have to say about the role of mobile in transmedia content production and distribution.

Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner Entertainment

Jeff is the CEO of this transmedia pioneer that Fast Company named the #5 most innovate company in media in 2011. He speaks at cross-media events around the world. Jeff was instrumental in getting the transmedia producer credit recognized by the Producers Guild of America and he claims to be working on a transmedia storytelling textbook.

Last month Jeff—with Simon Pullman, the curator of the Transmythology blog—wrote for AdAge about the transmedia campaign for Ridley Scott’s upcoming film, Prometheus. The movie’s TED2023 viral video starring Guy Pierce was the first installment in a truly cross-media campaign that blurs the lines between storytelling and marketing.

Jeff defines an effective transmedia video as follows: “Unlike conventional trailers, which use rapidly cut, repurposed footage and are widely available online along with straight clips, transmedia videos expand the movie’s narrative and encourage fans to immerse themselves more deeply into the story. The advertising becomes part of the movie—with the bonus that it is tailored for mobile devices and sharing across social networks. Brands are even beginning to leverage the power of HTML 5 technologies to create videos with embedded interactive and social features.”

In an article last year for Mobilized TV, Jeff discusses a number of entertainment franchises that successfully incorporated transmedia, including Heroes and Glee.

He cited that Glee “…manifests itself on many platforms including mobile and literally dialoguing with its core fan base. It’s listening to me using the devices I’m familiar with and the devices I want to be reached on. It shows me that it’s listening to me because it integrates how I feel about the show, acknowledges in-jokes the fans have, worldwide. Of course there are an array of apps, official and fan-generated that build on the intimacy that fans feel for the show, and this is all quite lucrative for the Glee producers and for Fox.”

Jeff recently spoke at The Cross-Media Forum 2011 in London, where he discussed this question in depth: how we tell our stories to an audience that is migrating in greater numbers to mobile, social media, videogame and other digital platforms?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Elan Lee, FourthWall Studios

Elan is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of FourthWall Studios. He recently moved to Los Angeles from Seattle—where he lived for twelve years—to build the company’s experiential media production business.

FourthWall has garnered a lot of attention in the last year. In addition to write-ups in Hollywood Reporter, Wired, the L.A. Times, TurnStyle News, and Boing Boing, they received a $200 million funding commitment to launch an “Alternate Reality Entertainment” studio. The company is building two mobile-enabled transmedia platforms for producers: RIDES.tv and a mobile augmented reality set-up, “Elseware.”

Mobile devices are uniquely positioned as endpoints for participatory storytelling experiences. Elan describes how the audience can interact with a character in the story using RIDES: “…you watch him walk across the room to make a phone call, and the next moment, the cell phone in your pocket starts ringing. Cause the character is calling you. Characters can send you emails and text messages and social media events and use the elements of your life as part of the storytelling experience.”

FourthWall is launching a web TV show that showcases the capabilities of their new studio and the RIDES.tv platform. Check out the trailer for Dirty Work.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Robert Pratten, Transmedia Storyteller Ltd.

Robert is a UK-based expert who speaks around the world, has co-produced transmedia entertainment titles, and consults for brands interested in transmedia advertising and marketing. His company is developing a transmedia storytelling platform, Conducttr.

Robert advocates designing participative, open storyworlds, integrated marketing and entertainment vehicles that create an ongoing experience that audiences want to engage with. His showcase projects have incorporated product packaging, retail displays, location-based events, video series, print, and social media.

Mobilized TV interviewed Robert last year; the article illustrates a second-screen television viewing experience where mobile is integral to the story.

Robert stated, “The key is to tell multi-platform stories: not repurposing B-roll content (that doesn’t create a compelling enough mobile value proposition) or churning out tedious encyclopedic character detail (let the fans create that) but by writing multi-layered stories with additional sub-plots and parallel plots intended specifically for mobile and to be enjoyed socially either at air time or later on demand.”

Robert spoke at the Rotterdam International Film Festival earlier this year. He presented a new creative and business vision for independent filmmakers, centered in transmedia storytelling and marketing.

Summing it up
Our experts highlight three important roles that mobile can play in transmedia production and distribution:
• Create original, compelling, mobile optimized video that adds to the storyworld and the marketing campaign
• Use mobile as a second screen to enable audiences to participate in the storyworld
• Implement mobile/social feedback mechanisms to establish a dialogue with your audience

Elan Lee recently appeared on UWTV. A quote from his interview with Hanson Hosein is the perfect conclusion to this article: “The only way we’re ever going to figure out what’s going to work and not going to work, is to try everything, and then hold on to the successes.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Apple IIc

28 years ago, Apple produced its first portable computer: the Apple IIc. Weighing in at just under 8 pounds, one had to lug it about in a cooler-sized shoulder bag.

The IIc cost $1,300, excluding peripherals (a joystick would have set you back $60.00 more). Despite this, the IIc was intended to make computing accessible to everyday consumers. Its user manual endeavored to convince non-technical audiences that the Apple IIc was both practical and entertaining. When buying a IIc, you “chose a philosophy — that using a computer is fun.”

It’s unlikely that non-techie users knew what to do with the included modem. Although the IIc predated the internet, you could still use it to dial into bulletin board systems  to exchange messages and downloads with others, at the time a realm exclusive to geeks.

Steve Jobs, however, knew that connectivity was destined to become a  major selling feature of personal computers, which likely explains its early inclusion in the Apple II computer series. In 1985, he had the following prescient conversation with Playboy:

Jobs: “So far [the personal computer] is more of a conceptual market than a real market. The primary reasons to buy a computer for your home now are that you want to do some business work at home or you want to run educational software for yourself or your children. If you can’t justify buying a computer for one of those two reasons, the only other possible reason is that you just want to be computer literate. You know there’s something going on, you don’t exactly know what it is, so you want to learn. This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes.”

Playboy: “What will change?”

Jobs: “The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people ‐‐ as remarkable as the telephone.”

Playboy: “Then for now, aren’t you asking home-computer buyers to invest invest $3000 inwhat is essentially an act of faith?

Jobs: “In the future, it won’t be an act of faith.”

Show Your Library Some Love campaign logo (Courtesy of Libraries Yes Campaign)

The Multnomah County library ballot initiative provided an opportunity to launch a crowdsourced social media campaign that leveraged place-based networks — social networks that aggregate user visits and reviews of physical locations, such as Yelp or Foursquare — to raise awareness and build community around the library system.

PORTLAND, Ore. — With a library circulation second only to New York City, there was no doubt that the Multnomah County Library Levy Renewal (ballot initiative 26-125) would pass. This is a city that loves its libraries. (Seattle comes in at number five. Not too shabby.)

Think about that for a minute. A city of less than one million has a circulation that is second only to a city with over eight times the population. That’s c-r-a-z-y.

Not surprisingly, the levy — which renewed a rate of $.89 per $1,000 of assessed property value for three more years — passed with over 80% of the vote last Tuesday. Good thing too, as the Multnomah County Library is facing an $11 million shortfall.

Despite the favorable climate, the Libraries Yes Campaign wasn’t going to rest on their laurels — and furthermore they saw a golden opportunity leading up to the vote. Conceived by local agency Winning Mark, the campaign launched “Heart Your Library/Show Your Library Some Love,” which leveraged four place-based social networks — Google Places, Foursquare, Yelp, and Facebook Places — to engage library users in a way that would both strengthen the campaign and in the words of Winning Mark partner and founder Jeff Lennan, “build a relationship for a reason.”

Pam Kahl in Portland, Oregon on May 14, 2012. Kahl assisted with the social media outreach for the Libraries Yes Campaign. (Photo by A.V. Crofts/UW Election Eye)

To many Portlanders — a city with a high concentration of digirati — their library system is a source of immense pride and they are ready to flock to social media platforms to express their love. “It’s a jewel,” says communications consultant and MCDM graduate Pam Kahl, who joined the Libraries Yes Campaign to support the online engagement.

“All these place-based networks have been more business oriented,” said Kahl when I met her in one of Portland’s many independent coffee shops (the customers were right out of Portlandia central casting). “But now the power of crowd-sourced opinions for public entities takes on a new dimension.”

According to Kahl, the day that Portlanders were invited to review their libraries on Yelp, the response was so overwhelming that Yelp headquarters assumed it was spam.

One of the beauties of “Heart Your Library” is that it worked in a concentrated period of a few months leading up to the May 15 election, but has long-term engagement possibilities as well. “It has a long tail,” said Lennan.

To start, it allows the library system to identify its key supporters and nurture that network. In addition, it provides a platform where library fans use their own words and experiences to tell the library’s story, the “holy grail for campaigns,” according to Lennan.

As the chart to the right demonstrates, over the course of seven weeks there was a steep increase in cumulative IDs and outreach contacts. An outreach contact represents an individual that was directly contacted by a campaign organizer. An ID represents a library supporter that responded to this outreach and took action to support the libraries: by uploading a photo on the campaign’s Pinterest page, volunteering, or tweeting to name just three examples.

Now that the levy was successfully renewed, the next step is continuing to harness the momentum of the campaign. “We want to move users from social to a conversation,” said Lennan.

The implications for using place-based social channels to review and promote public institutions are just being discovered. This excites Lennan. As he explained, this allows individuals to promote institutions that are “publicly financed and matter to them on a personal level.”

So go ahead, show your library a little love.
This entry was cross-posted with UW Election Eye.

Brian Stelter (left) and David Carr (center) from the New York Times keynote Internet Week

“Boy was I ever important,” New York Times columnist David Carr declared during his Internet Week keynote. That’s when the newspapers’ presses – located one floor below — would come to life after he had submitted an important scoop, “and you would feel the rumble in your butt,” Carr said.

Now, the once all-powerful cabal of media gatekeepers and its machinery has surrendered to the hordes of startups and content-producing barbarians of the digital age. Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg used this annual festival of 250 events to revel in his city surpassing Boston as a haven for tech entrepreneurs and announce the new Made in NY Digital Jobs Map, it all went down in the shadow of that social media behemoth in Menlo Park, California and its impending Initial Public Offering.

It was entirely appropriate to watch Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ring Nasdaq’s Wall Street bell by remote control on Friday from the comfort of his headquarters’ courtyard on the other end of the country. Mayor Bloomberg may have seen it fit to parade a young entrepreneur who had moved to Silicon Valley only to return to New York City’s “Silicon Alley” four months later as proof of the city’s economic resurgence, but even the grizzled reporters in the front row saw past this ruse. A CEO barely out of his teens who had hightailed it back home after such a short West Coast rite of initiation proved nothing.

New York City Michael Bloomberg at Internet Week

Certainly, there is much to trumpet in the tech renaissance of a city that has still yet to properly recover from the 2008 economic crisis. But this week also saw Forbes call out Seattle as the best city for tech jobs, thanks to the huge demand for employees with skills in the science, technology, engineering and math fields (STEM). New York, by comparison, ranks #33 on the Forbes list. Bloomberg has moved quickly to address this, by striking deals with top-flight universities such as Cornell and Israel’s Technion Institute, which will partner for a new higher education facility in Roosevelt Island. Washington state’s colleges, by comparison, are not producing enough homegrown talent to meet regional demand.

Maybe it was my own conditioning as a product of the Columbia Journalism School and former NBC News journalist that convinced me we had to use Internet Week as a selling opportunity for our own graduate degree program, and just-announced digital media bootcamp. This was especially true when a few self-important digital media execs passed by our booth and wondered aloud whether there was a tech industry in Seattle, or “I thought the University of Washington was in D.C.” We have to fight for relevance in region teeming with brand-name institutions, even as business and political leaders here wonder aloud about their own.

General Assembly entrepreneurs at work

“So you’re here to steal our ideas,” my General Assembly tour guide half-joked when I explained why I wanted to tour their campus, part-incubator, part casual college for entrepreneurs. I was actually looking for a way to establish an east coast partner for some our Seattle-flavored “TED meets graduate school” seminar series. But I realized immediately that this was a non-starter.

We finally broke through that Big Apple brusqueness when we co-hosted a happy hour in the SoHo neighborhood in partnership with Seattle social media guru Shauna Causey and her new company, Decide.com. First, I shared my takeaways from Internet Week. A recent declaration by an IBM executive reveals that we’re drowning in data, producing 5 billion gigabytes from the beginning of human history until 2003. In 2011, we produced that same amount of information every two days; in 2013, it’ll be every 10 minutes. So it was entirely appropriate that Mashable founder Pete Cashmore emphasized that “brand is incredibly important” as a way to differentiate in the chaos of too much content. Increasingly, we’re finding insightful ways to measure all of this Big Data, as first day keynoter Billy Beane did for the Oakland A’s (and then inspired Brad Pitt to play him in Moneyball).

Shauna then really hit the mark by sharing her hard-won victories implementing social media strategies at Comcast and Nordstrom. Suddenly, people were paying attention to us – by the end of the evening a few were even wondering aloud about whether they should move to Seattle. It could have been the open bar, but I like to think that by then, maybe they had realized that we have some ideas worth stealing too.

Hanson Hosein is the Director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington. On June 12th, the MCDM is offering a one-day digital media workshop in storytelling, marketing, analytics and law in South Lake Union: registration.

[an edited version of this story was originally posted to GeekWire]

While this type of spike is not uncommon during IPOs and is in line with the trading debut patterns of other companies, subtle  swings in share price now have massive implications for the financial health of a company that began as a side project in a dorm room.

In other words, Facebook is now a serious business and the company’s financial health as a publicly traded company impacts not only it’s stakeholders, but all of us who work in digital media. Concerns over whether Facebook can maintain and increase its revenue and lack of a definitive mobile strategy underscore the larger debate over the value of social media and whether companies can leverage enterprises like Facebook to make money.

Given that so much of Facebook’s financial future rests in its ability to convert its users’ personal data into cash money for companies, it’s worth recalling a public poll by CNBC and the Associated price that revealed half of its respondents considered Facebook to be a passing “fad”.

Are they right? Share your thoughts through the poll at the bottom of the post or in the comments below.

In the meantime, here’s brief summarizing some of the opinions on either side of the issue.

Yes, Facebook is a fad.

“A lot of social networks have come, peaked out and were replaced by another with better features, more usable UI/technology, etc.,” observes a user on the question and answer website Quora. In this view, Facebook is just like any other tech companies that will ultimately lose market share to the next big thing. Failure to adapt or innovate often results in waning user interest and one only has to recall the likes of Friendster and MySpace – whom were once considered the Goliaths to Zuckerburg’s David – to project what kind of future may eventually lay ahead for Team Facebook.

Last year, reports also suggested, albeit briefly, that Facebook was actually losing daily active users in the US. Couple this with what seems like ongoing user complaints about privacy settings, tweaks to Facebook’s UI and that general panning of its recent Timeline UI evolution, it’s possible to think that Facebook users would jump ship to a competitor that handled these things better.  Well, if Facebook doesn’t acquire them first.

On the business end, it’s difficult to view Facebook’s big day without also considering the status of other publicly-traded companies driven by social including GroupOn, LinkedIn, Yelp and Zynga – the shares of which were, at the time of writing, trading down.

No, Facebook is here to say.

With a reportedly growing base of 900 million active monthly users, the social network will soon touch the lives of 1 in 6 people around the globe.  With this level of global penetration, it’s a slim chance that a Facebook competitor will ever be able to effectively challenge the social network’s domination. Other networks will be successful, but they will focus on niche verticals, innovative content flows or differentiated user experience.

Sure, Facebook isn’t for everyone, and the company’s mishandling of privacy concerns has been reason enough for many to shutter their accounts, but active users are spending more time on Facebook, both on desktop and mobile, than ever before. Facebook also still has tremendous opportunities in emerging markets like India, which is projected to overtake the US as the largest consumer base by country in 2015, and China, where current government restrictions have limited penetration to only .04% of the population. All indicates that Facebook’s best days are still yet to come.

This “fad” question is a half-assed. 

“Facebook, the product, satisfies the human need to keep in touch. This behavior is not a fad, “ notes another Quora user. That being said, nothing lasts forever and Facebook will  surely cease to exist someday.  But to dismiss Facebook as a “fad”, then, overlooks its significance as a technology that has redefined how we, as humans, communicate with one another.  Facebook will eventually fade away, whether due to an organic loss of interest from users or an executive misjudgment of user privacy, but Facebook won’t die overnight and, like the the telegraph or the telephone  shouldn’t be considered so much of a fad so much as an innovation that will influence communication technology for generations to come.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” wrote Zuckerberg to investors when it filed for its IPO back in February. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.” Eight years later, Facebook is anything but a temporary success, having proven it can accomplish this social mission, while being highly profitable as a private company.  But Friday’s IPO introduces a host of new challenges that make the company more vulnerable than ever to forces contrary to its original vision.  While Facebook’s fate may not happen in the short-term, its long-term destiny is now tied directly to a stock price that, when falling, can limit its ability to attract or acquire top engineering talent and better adapt the evolving needs of its users.

As Zach  from Reed College has now learned. Earlier this week, his “d’oh” moment was aired on “Wheel of Fortune.” And while not that many people watch the show, how many hundreds of thousands of viewers saw the clip on YouTube after the Huffington Post ran an article about it, I can’t even guess. (The version that I’ve copied here had over 600,000 views.)

I suppose the good news for Zach is that in another five years, there probably won’t be anyone left who doesn’t have something embarrassing up on the internet.

But for now, he’s an internet failstar.

Click here to view the embedded video.