Following up on posts and pieces by Mark, Marcus Westbury and Ben Eltham, I’ve got a little point to make about the whole Towards a Creative Australia 2020 stream too. And it goes to the links between creativity and innovation. Futurists often try to dream up pseudo-apocalyptic models of creative destruction – the death of the book, for instance (on which, see a sceptical Cory Doctorow on e books and screen reading). And, after all, one of the best selling books by a futurist in America last year was a tome by Hillary Clinton’s (ex) chief strategist, Mark Penn, for chrissakes.
If we’re thinking 2020, a lot of what we need to think about is emerging now – a point made in a good comment on an earlier thread by DeeCee. Take the biz of online news and views – what’s becoming very clear already is that platform is relatively unimportant (a broader trend that is hurting Microsoft for instance) and content trumps branding. Because readers are already making their own compendia of news and views, with or without tools such as social bookmarking. Established media are often playing catchup – as with the Australian tv networks. Here’s the killer quote from a story on enabling legal downloads:
“The reason people are illegally using P2P [peer-to-peer] networks is simply because content isn’t available elsewhere,” says Ten’s general manager, Digital Media, Damian Smith.
What’s the point of requiring a certain percentage of Australian content on free to air tv when most of it’s awful, and people are watching whatever they like from wherever they like whenever they like? As Tama Leaver glosses Damian Smith:
(So give me a legal way to download Battlestar Galactica today and I will!)
Innovation isn’t so much in *the next big thing* but in clever ways to surf what’s already happening, and arrange it in new and exciting ways. In literary terms, game design and web 2.0 thinking can provide new ways of telling and narrating a story. Witness this very spiffy example of what a stack of writers are doing at Penguin online. The innovation is in the design, and the way a certain culture of innovation morphs an established literary form into something new and interesting. Australians, I’d wager, would potentially be very good at all this. Except we’re held back by stupid policy decisions giving us forever to wait for fast broadband and protecting established monopolies which provide junk content. The best idea might be to map whatever’s already happening – and facilitate that! Provide some cotton with which to spin the creative web, as it were… The innovation that’s already out there lies in the social, not in the creaky monopolistic realm of *official* culture.
Anyway, that’s my big idea!
One of the great problems in trying to deal with any of this is the inherent lag in trying to get anything rooted in *now* through the decision making process. The lack of any framework that even vaguely allows for a responsive, quick turn around decision making process is the hard part.
Can you imagine what the process would be to “map what’s already happening” – my fear is that that alone would take 3 years and sit on a minister’s desk for a further two.
Don’t mind me, i am just overwhelmed from reading too many cynical 2020 submissions coming at me from every direction!
A fair bit of the mapping has already been done, Marcus, through the efforts of centres like CCi and sociologists and other analysts of the media and the online sphere. It actually wouldn’t be a huge job to pull it together – maybe a couple of month’s work for a consultancy – if the political will were there. It’s not as though there aren’t a lot of folks in this country who aren’t already researching and writing astute stuff about what’s actually happening in terms of creativity and e-innovation.
Of course, as you say, the dead hand of bureaucracy… but then I thought one of Rudd’s main goals was to short circuit the bureaucratic process?
All the broadcasters are frantically trying to tap into ways of using Web 2, so they can separate money from the punters pockets in new and innovative ways. The problem is that there are very few people who work for broadcasters who understand how the web works. A bit like Canberra politicians.
But I’m a bit wary of the ‘television is dead’ claims. Certainly the audience is ageing, but it’s still a huge one.
Content producers would love to bypass the broadcasters and reach an international markets directly, but it’s actually quite difficult to construct models that work financially. Part of the problem is that the web is so noisy and people are so used to getting product for free that it’s hard to reach an audience and hard to get them to pay for product.
But there’s lots of interesting stuff hapening. I particularly like this site.
http://www.opensourcecinema.org
I disagree with him regarding ebooks. I’ve had an ebook reader for a couple of months now and think paper books are on definitely on notice. Magazines definitely. But books or magazines aren’t really going to die, just the way that the same information is distributed. As for authors, if anything its going to make it easier for new authors to break into the market – near zero distribution costs and very low setup costs.
What about when domain squatting (oh I’m sorry, ‘PARKING’) goes the bigtime and we’re paying $300 for a url barely resembling our business/product/creation?
DomainWatch: A Bishop Government Initiative?