This Week’s Insights: We’re losing the underlying Wild West culture of the internet… Facebook has become essential community for composers… A new hall in Paris lures the masses… Screen addiction is a serious audience problem.
- The Internet Is Dying (Again): Every several months in like forever, someone writes a piece about how the internet is dying. In recent years the internet was dying because Facebook (And others) were walling themselves off from the bigger web, impoverishing it. The new hand wringing is about consolidation and how the culture of the internet, which has been open and free and innovative and fast moving and independent, is becoming consolidated around a handful of mega-corporations which will control how we access, who gets on and what they see. Killing net neutrality will certainly accelerate this. But in terms of audience, having an internet controlled by large entities is not a good thing. It flattens diversity, makes innovation by small disruptors more difficult, and ultimately puts more control in the hands of fewer players. Worth exploring this argument.
- Is Facebook Saving New Music? People love to hate on Facebook, but the platform has become a lifeline for artists who want to follow fellow artists and see (or hear) their work. “It has seemed that for the entire 2010s thus far, Facebook has been a place for composers and co. (whether to chat, laugh, share work, share opportunities, discuss musical issues, discuss politics, fight like hell) to come together. The same is true for actors, string players, academics, doctors, and bankers, to some extent, I’m assuming. But for composers, or for the several hundred spread over six continents whom I’m FB friends with, at any rate, it has functioned as one of the relevant gathering places for those of us who couldn’t make it to the show last night.”
- Place Matters: Paris’s new concert hall isn’t at the center – it’s at the northern edge of the city. Before it opened, many worried that audiences wouldn’t venture out. But “nearly three years later, concerts are selling better than they used to at the (older and smaller) Salle Pleyel, and the crowds are younger and more diverse.” So here are some lessons about location and how that matters to building audiences.
- The Science of Distraction: That’s really what social media is, what it was designed for. “If you’re on social media, you’re being presented with stimuli all the time, stimuli that are demanding a response from you. If that’s the case, how do you navigate that moment?” And how, whether you’re the person trying to concentrate on something or the creator of an experience you want people to participate in, do you lure the screen-addicted (and who among us isn’t?) to pay attention?
From the beginning, the deregulated, libertarian ethos of the Internet played into the hands of neoliberalism since it applied the same libertarian ethos to deregulated, borderless web marketing. This then leads to the ironic twist. The 800 pound gorillas increased their power through deregulation, and our now using that power to create regulations that give them even more power.