Futures of Entertainment Conference

CMS/C3 MIT Nov 17, 2006

Lots of acronyms here, but the bottom line was pretty sweet. Our fearless leader Henry Jenkins + a talented team of C3 researchers put together a conference Nov 17-18 on the Futures of Entertainment Some high points:

User Generated Content panel generated three principles for fostering a UGC friendly ecosystem.

1. Be really cautions about limiting user choice. Limiting choice (shot selection, audio clips, etc.) creates a backlash. The company running the platform should not limit the creator (user).
2. Be honest with your users. Let them know if you’ve screwed up.
3. It does not matter if UGC is “bad” or negative. At this point in time, the excellence is in creating, not looking at end product.

Ok, maybe two more

4. You can’t be more clever than the Internet. Architectures that invite participation are more likely to be successful than those that do not.
5. Participatory culture elicits emergent behavior. And emergent behavior is…unpredictable.

Now, there was plenty of debate within the panel about the status of professional producers and their fate in relation to the exponential growth of a user’s Web. Everyone agreed that participatory culture is a strong part of the future of entertainment culture, and, as William Gibson has quipped, it’s a future that has already arrived, just in mixed proportions.

Paul Levitz, President of DC Comics, who presented on the Transmedia Properties panel, gave me this back channel directive on gauging UGS or, actually, content in general. “Forget good and bad,” Levitz advised. “The equation exposure/sustainability is a more helpful measure.” In this case exposure includes issues of distribution and sustainability speaks to cultural value and stickiness. As DC is bringing under its own imprimatur indie (truly indie) online comics such as MegaTokyo, Levitz is certainly walking the walk.

Ok, so all of this might be helpful for Web 2.0 rules of success. But frankly, we’re already at a maximum capacity in networked-ness, connectivity, and uh, “friends.” So the beginnings of a conversation amongst this conference participants had to do with what kind of viable filtrations systems can be put in place for Web 3.0. More on that later.