This Week In Audience, Universal Translator Edition

How will stories change when we have a universal translator? How will our relationships to things change when things respond to our voices? What is a live performance when the performer isn’t live? Why you increasingly can’t buy cheap tickets. And why crowdfunding is having a corrosive effect on art.

1. Experience At Warp Speed? Last week a company introduced a version of a universal translator. You and the person you’re talking to have an earpiece, and the device translates in near-real time in whatever language you’re speaking. G. Clay Whittaker worries that the need for learning second languages will go away. You think globalization has homogenized culture already? What happens when language is no longer a barrier? And if we’re all able to understand one another (in the basic information-sharing kind of way) then what will that mean for how artists tell stories and share experiences?
2. Need Something, Say Something: Amazon’s Alexa is changing how people interact with their kitchens and living rooms. Instead of having to search for a remote or fumble with your phone, you just make a request and Alexa responds. It’s an amazingly transformative experience, and we’re still in the early stages of voice control. Increasingly, people are going to expect this kind of simple interaction with the things around them, and in the process our relationships with the things around us will change. Wondering how? An ex-NPR exec thinks voice control could kill NPR’s news magazine shows as they currently work. Instead of listening to radio, listeners will curate their own playlists of news, information and entertainment just by asking for it. And that’s just the start. Think about all the friction-points in going to the theatre or museum, and how voice interaction with smart machines might change those experiences.
3. Performers Who Aren’t There And The Audiences Who Love Them: Last week a Japanese hologram performed in a live concert in Toronto in front of 3000 fans, and the crowd, as they say, went wild. “Japan’s Hatsune Miku, making her Canadian concert debut, incited the same unbridled glee among the sold-out crowd of 3,000 as a human would at the top of her game, despite the fact that Miku is a software program represented in concert by a hologram.” So what was the essential live experience here? Artists are always talking about the importance of live performance, but as the blending of technology and analog experience meld, what does it actually mean to be in a live performance?
4.  Why You Can’t Buy Cheap Tickets To Popular Shows: Increasingly, secondary market ticket-sellers are slurping up more and more of the inventory, then re-selling them for vastly inflated prices. In the UK there’s currently a debate about the need for new regulations to control the practice. And earlier this year, New York’s attorney general looked into secondary ticket selling and discovered than more than half of tickets to popular shows were bought by re-sellers.  Increasingly, fans are competing with technology to get tickets: “There are ‘ticket bots,’ a type of specialty software used to hover over websites waiting for ticket sales to begin. Most sites allow tickets to stay in reserve for a few minutes, so that customers can submit their credit card info. Bots take advantage of this feature by mass-reserving tickets so that others can’t purchase them, the report found.”
5. Why Crowdfunding Is Devaluing Art: Crowdfunding seems like an attractive opportunity for artists trying to fund projects, and some have been successful at it. But crowdfunding is essentially about producing content, and herein lies the problem. “Art and content are not the same. Content is produced with a specific, marketable goal in mind. Patreon turns artists into content-makers whose creativity is moderated by their patrons. Patrons with more money have more clout, and the ability to withhold funding shapes what creators make. In this sense, Patreon reproduces key elements of the old patronage model, in which the power to commission and influence artists rests in the hands of those who can pay.”

Image: Wikipedia