What We Learned About Audiences This Week (Mediums Matter)

This Week’s Insights: How Netflix is changing the watching culture… Are super-fans too toxic?… We can categorize the things that steal our attention… How an audience signals its savvy.

1. Is Netflix A Vehicle Or A Culture? The answer is both. As a vehicle it has changed the way viewers access movies and TV. As a culture, it has changed expectations for how audiences want to access content. Traditional delivery of TV and movies had their own cultures, and the mediums have been been repeatedly reinvented over the years as technologies and delivery systems evolved.  Bt Netflix doesn’t want to be a streaming, supersized clone of HBO or FX or NBC. It’s trying to change the way we watch television, and is building a new culture around its content.
2. Toxic Fans? To be a member of a fandom is to take a property and embrace it like a vise. You consume it, you talk about it with fellow fans, maybe you go to conventions, maybe you write fanfic or draw fanart, and no matter what — and this is the most crucial part — you pray that, if there’s more of it, it’ll be as good as the best of what’s come before. But to be a fan fanatic is to claim some ownership. And it can crowd out other fans who aren’t… perhaps as vocal or expressive.
3. What If The Art Form Doesn’t Match The Medium?  “Consumers are now, often unconsciously, sorting every media product — from podcasts to magazine stories to video — into three categories: intentional, interstitial, and invisible. The implications of these changes are huge, especially for the people who create what we watch.” Daniel H. Pink makes the case for intentional content (“couch shows” that you make a point to sit and watch) and interstitial content: “programming we use to fill the spaces in our lives — 10 minutes in a grocery store line, 5 minutes waiting to pick up a kid at practice, 35 minutes on a train or bus.” Bite-size content? Distraction fodder?
4. Does Walking Out Of A Performance Mark You As A Yahoo? The Charleston City Paper’s Maura Hogan suggests a rethink for Spoleto Festival audience members. :I suggest that we revisit our contract with the international arts festival that was paramount to forging the vibrant, preternaturally cultivated city many of us call home. Perhaps some among us view our annual arts dive as simply transactional. The customer is always right, so we can bolt from or belittle performances as we see fit. I would argue that we are missing the point. What’s more, if you truly have pride in place regarding our singular city, I can promise you that the provincial attitudes regarding its relationship with world-class performance telegraph that if you scratch the surface — if you go beyond the high-end Boho apparel and performance belt-notching — the walk-outs and sneers render us collectively a bunch of yahoos.”