What would Rupert do?

The usual marketing scheme for a successful series would be selling licensed products. So there is a loveless website, t-shirts, coffee mugs, DVDs, comics, eventually the stars produce a mediocre pop song. Fan pages will be sued, and the industry would bitch about weak sales because of evil pirates. However we’ve seen more successful ways, for example when the fantasy and science fiction novels that came along with Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun became more popular than the original role-playing games. All those products are set in the same fictional world, but the different media remain closed in themselves: for understanding the novels it is not necessary to know the game.

Then what is transmedia? Here is a quick introduction:

“Heroes provides the most innovative and immersive interactive TV experience on the web.”

Central in that universe is the TV series, accompanied by a wiki, web comics (in JPEG, flash or PDF format), several websites, mobile strategies, webisodes exclusively published on the web and many more – and they all form a narrative whole!

Transmedia Storytelling

When a character doesn’t appear in the series for a couple of episodes, their story goes on in the webcomics. The fictional characters have their own blogs, pages on MySpace and Facebook and ask their fans for help via SMS. Hanna even publishes clips from news channels in her blog. A fictional candidate for the US congress has his own website hacked by Hanna. Another discusses scientific theories in his book Activating Evolution (would be even more convincing if it was out-of-sale at Amazon). Fictional companies appear in the series, fans can apply for jobs on their websites thus getting insider information, or they can “hack” their surveillance cameras. Fan fiction and art is supported and can eventually become part of the series.

That idea isn’t exactly new, emotionally drawing in the fan base through “secret” information. As early as 1997, before the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas registered numerous domains temporarily forwarding to starwars.com. Then the information was spread around in Usenet and they observed which domains generated the most page views. Then a mysterious swamp environment was created at naboo.com. Apart from the usual swamp noise we can hear the calls of the Peko bird and the Nuna toad. Subtly playing with the methods of easter eggs those animals will move across the screen when you enter “peko” or “nuna” hearing their sounds. After about five minutes the swamp water begins to ripple. If you click on it you originally landed on a simple page with background information. Of course ten years later Heroes is editing and interweaving the content more elaborately – originally there were five people on their web team, now there are more than fifty.

Heroes has a world wide fan community – even in countries where the series isn’t officially aired on TV. It’s one of the most unauthorized downloaded torrents on the web. At least producer Tim Kring doesn’t mind that: Kring says “we fish where the fish are.” The whole multimedia strategy is designed for numerous sources of income. If fans get hooked via illegal downloads, the company will earn money elsewhere with them.

Most importantly today’s fans want to participate in “their” series, and this means more than offering contests and sueing them when they actually adopt content. Heroes is the pioneer massively involving their fan community into that complex alternate reality. The web provides the central communication platform, technically but most important creatively. In that depth this is an entirely new challenge for TV providers and Internet agencies!

What can we learn from this?

On YouTube alone on this topic there are some 1,500 videos with a total duration of 25.2 hours. There are videos on almost every topic, however bizarre they may be. Even on topics that aren’t any topic at all, like “we got some food at McDonald’s and film now how we eat burgers.” Who watches that stuff? Hardly anybody. Welcome to the “long tail,” the niches of exponential decline accounting for a large amount of more than 100 million videos on YouTube.

There is a point when those niches become unmarketable. We’ve seen in the video above how larksome kids set their car on fire, or half a forest. Others test flamethrowers in their bedroom or try to light a cigarette with a flamethrower. These are rather silly actions, not mentioning obviously illegal things – alone on the consuming of psychoactive salvia (prohibited in Germany) there are 13,700 videos on YouTube.

Nobody would buy adverts on such a video. However, YouTube is financed by advertising. At the same time it becomes exponentially easier to produce and upload videos with a camera on your mobile: the “long tail” gets longer, thus the costs for hosting and streaming. Well, at the same time those latter factors get cheaper by the hour, but with the commercialization of those platforms the question arises: are those microgenres endangered? And what would we miss if we didn’t have these obscure contents any more?

Microgenres are the primeval soup of the Internet. Here the trends of tomorrow crop up, therefore they are also an economic driving force.

Even if there’s no such things as a community, a subculture of youth with self-made flamethrowers – for example the discussion whether there is a danger of flames flashing back into the container appears over and over again – still those contents create social relationships.

With those single irrelevant snapshots in time our society has the unique opportunity to create a comprehensive archive of everyday life of the 21st century. Just think of the scientific value of these recordings today or in a hundred years! Therefore yes, what we consider trivial today will have considerable historic-documentary or scientific value tomorrow.

And yes, in the hands of a company like Google that is subject to commercial constraints and changes, this content is in danger of getting deleted. Out of the top 100 companies existing a hundred years ago, today still three exist. While commercial, expensively produced content has linear growth, non-commercial content grows exponentially. When there is a point where the marketable part cannot support the other any longer, we are facing the loss of this archive of amateur recordings. Unless Google knows and speculates with that value?

A possible solution might be a new initiative by Wikimedia: let’s get video on Wikipedia. Because even while today 1,500 flamethrower videos are still irrelevant for an article on Wikipedia, they could find a new home at Wikimedia Commons.

This post is to commemorate my grandfather’s grandmother, Antonia Odenweller. She was born 33 years after Lady Ada, on January 7th, 1849, in Kransberg, a village in a valley of the Taunus mountains, about 30 km north of Frankfurt. She was the daughter of the mason Ludwig Friedrich¹ and his wife Eva.² My great-great-grandmother married Joseph Odenweller³ in 1870 who served as a combat medic in the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71, where he received an internal wound that led to his early decease in 1878 at the age of 30. Antonia died March 3rd, 1911, in Usingen.

So what’s got that to do with technology, you ask? Here’s what my grandfather Wilhelm Kliehm wrote about her in his diary,⁴ more than 50 years ago:

Due to the early loss of her bread-winner my grandmother had to earn her livelihood by sewing. Thus she was often out-of-town, and mostly in Winter she was at our place at home.

People tell me about her that she was the most beautiful and strongest of her siblings. She was good at writing poems and provided them to everybody at every occasion. Alas I wasn’t able to obtain any of them until today.

Grandmother was in her younger days (roughly at 14-18 years) in Friedrichsdorf in the employ of Philipp Reis, the inventor of the telephone, at a time when Reis was still working on the invention. Grandmother often had to help him strain the wires across the yard into the barn, listening to the first sounds. So to speak she was the first foreign person Philipp Reis was speaking to on the phone.

In fact the Philipp-Reis-Museum and archive in Friedrichsdorf confirmed that Antonia worked in the household around 1866; according to the notes of my grandfather she would have been employed there between 1863-1867. Philipp Reis started to work on his first prototype between 1858-1863, he also coined the term telephone.

Alas the inventor died of tuberculosis in 1874; I guess otherwise grandma Antonia could have asked him for work after her husband passed away, instead she resorted to sewing. I can imagine her very well straining the wires and assisting Reis, and since she wrote poems I assume she was somewhat smart — who knows what else she contributed to the invention? Had she been born in another century, she might have become an engineer!

The barn where Philipp Reis had his workshop:

In a broader historical context, Prussia annexed the Free City of Frankfurt and the Southern part of the Grand-Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1866 after the allies lost the Austro-Prussian War. So I guess that brought massive changes to the citizens and could be the reason why my great-great-grandma quit her job in 1866/67 as it was unsafe for a young woman to work in occupied territory.

So this everyday example shows that even in the 19th century women in technology might have been more common than we thought, but were much more constrained by society. A mere 150 years later the constraints are less visible, but still exist in some people’s heads. Let us embrace diversity instead and respect the talents of people, without any reservations. My great-great-grandmother Antonia Odenweller is my personal technical heroine, and so could be you for successive generations.

Footnotes

Please note the German version of this post on my employer’s blog.

³ Joseph Odenweller
(1848-1878, her spouse)

¹ Ludwig Friedrich
(1824-1901, her father)

² Ludwig & Eva Friedrich
(1822-1906, her parents)

⁴ My grandfather’s diary notes (in German kurrent script):

I mention it here because the ultimate geek literature is written by geeks, and Cory Doctorow is as geeky as one can get: he is co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and publishes his books under a Creative Commons license, hence the availability as an e-book. Like the work of former programmers such as Iain Banks or Ken MacLeod (whose science fiction novel Learning the World inspired me in naming this blog) his books share the cultural background and mindset of readers who grew up with computer games, LARP, the free party movement, not to mention the inevitable Star Wars.

Although Little Brother is an awesome and entertaining read, there are frequent interspersians as part of the plot about encryption, hacking the Xbox, gentrification, RFID, TOR, or setting up your own underground movement. Marcus Yallow is a 17 year old h4ckr in San Francisco who gets caught in the middle of a terrorist attack. As a reaction the paranoid government turns the place into a police state, not catching any terrorists, but harassing ordinary people and cutting their civil rights.

If that sounds familiar you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that all this is lead by a (fictional) Department of Homeland Security, the guys who do not hesitate to steal your privacy and intellectual property by disassembling your gadgets when entering the US — unfortunately this is not fiction anymore. Probably that’s the most disturbing thing about this book: not only are most of the hacks actually working, but also state troopers with machine guns against ravers are a reality in Bush Country (and not only there), among other things.

Which brings me to another reason why I posted about the book: download it for free in almost any format you can imagine, get the audio book, buy it, donate it to schools. But read it. And if you live in the United States, go vote!