Our intern, Calvin, made this throwaway comment a few weeks ago in one of the blogs he wrote for us…and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since!
He didn’t claim the quote as his own, but I still think it is one of the most insightful comments I have heard in some time, and it set me off on a whole thought process that led to an interesting and somewhat contradictory conclusion.
Pass the sausages!
Travel back in time with me to the dawn of civilisation. Picture family groups huddling around campfires, listening to stories told by the elders of the tribe and singing the songs passed down from generation to generation. This is truly ‘narrow-cast’, small groups physically gathering around the content, and any discussion about the evening’s events took place there and then.
In those early days, religion and/or beliefs would have made up a large part of the content, and this model was to continue until the middle ages, albeit that family groups changed to religious congregations.
Theatre very much kept this approach alive; large groups consuming content at the same time, be it new content or existing content repeated or updated for a new audience. The innovation here was that the play could be repeated over and over as it toured around the country, or even to different countries, but groups experiencing the content continued to remain relatively small.
The advent of cinema at the turn of the 20th Century built on this. Although similar in nature to the experience of theatregoers, for the first time cinema allowed the same content to be shown in different places, and for wider groups to now start consuming it simultaneously. The same post-film conversations could be heard across the country, but these conversations remained isolated and short-lived.
Dreaming Fish crew reviewing their work
Fast forward to the invention of home radio and TV sets and the explosion of broadcast content. Technology is now involved and the audience has become dispersed. Only very small groups are now physically gathered around the content, but in disparate locations there are increasingly larger numbers. They are not physically co-located any more, but are still experiencing the same content at the same time. The discussion about the most popular shows is now carried out at the time of the show, or increasingly on subsequent days in the playground or at work following the advent of audio-tape and video recorders. These devices fracture the simultaneous audience, people no longer need to be in a certain place at a certain time, but they increase the life of the content and fuel the on-going discussion.
Then came the internet and video on-demand, with the opportunity to broadcast and narrow-cast, and for the content to be consumed when and where you wish. The physical audience is now almost down to the individual, but the virtual audience is now global, and for me this is the interesting point. People are still gathered around the content, but the difference is it’s not a physical gathering. However increasingly the conversations about the content take place simultaneously as people discuss the content live on Facebook or Twitter, just as they did back around the campfire. The conversations are the same, it’s just the medium that’s different.
So in some way we’ve come full circle; from the tribal group to a global audience we continue to experience and share content in a similar way. But one thing remains; it is the content that creates the conversation.
…or does it? Increasingly now it is the conversation that creates the content, but that’s the subject for a whole different blog!
Notes: Phil Miller is Director of Dreaming Fish Productions, a communications agency that specialises in high quality video production and animation. He also likes to sit around a campfire telling stories!
