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echovar Posts

Akropolis: Toward a Poor Video, or can YouTube be more?

Published January 7, 2008 by cgerrish

Looking at a film like “Atonement” with very rich production values brings to mind the work of avant-garde theater director Jerzy Grotowski. His work was the opposite. He developed a concept and a practice called the “Poor Theater.” It’s principles are:

  • Eliminate, not teach something (Via Negativa).
    • This can be described as a basic philosophy for actor training that essentially says the actor’s main task involves not accruing skills so much as eradicating obstacles that get in the way of being true.
  • Enhance that which already exists.
  • Create all that is needed for the play in the actor’s body, with little use of props.
  • Promote rigorous physical and vocal training of actors
  • Avoid the beautiful if it does not foster truth

While it’s true that the cost of video production has plummeted, the cost of putting something truly interesting in front of a camera remains the same. For Grotowski there was a physical cost, a spiritual cost and the high price of artistic discipline. Although perhaps it’s as David Lynch has recently described it, “you think you’ve had an experience watching a movie on a telephone, but you haven’t. It’s such a sadness”Could YouTube live and thrive in the ceremony of the theater? Is there a context where YouTube could be more than a viral joke? The content is already there, but when we view it, do we really see it?

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Pitching a Wagner opera parody for kids

Published January 6, 2008 by cgerrish

There was a time when opera themes were well known by the general public. Wagner’s music was so well known that a Bugs Bunny parody was a big hit. Can you imagine pitching this idea today?

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Scoble Erased: If only there were some kind of data Bank

Published January 5, 2008 by cgerrish

Robert Scoble complains about being erased. Or rather the data and content that he put on Facebook ceased to exist to the extend that he no longer had access to or control over it. We can talk all we want about how our attention data, social graph, personal data and created content is ours and we should have absolute and continuous access to it; in addition, we should be able to move it and leverage it in other contexts. This ignores the economics of the capture and storing of that data. The cost is not zero. If it were we could do it for ourselves.

And that I suppose is the point. We trade that data for a service, value traded for value. If Scoble doesn’t want to be erased, why not record a copy of everything he puts into a commercial website? He could keep it on a local hard drive or a network storage service. Or perhaps in some kind of gesture bank, where he could trade its value for goods and services.

Scoble needs to remember that it’s not really his, unless he invests in making it his.

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OLPC: Could Personal Computing Become an Entitlement?

Published January 5, 2008 by cgerrish

There was a day, not too long ago, that the soda pop companies understood that they weren’t in the soda pop business. Coke wasn’t simply competing with Pepsi. The carbonated sugar water companies were competing in the “drinking stuff” category. Every time a consumer chose water or ice tea instead of a cola drink, they lost a sale. That was the beginning of bottling and marketing tap water.

Intel seems to have had a similar revelation. One Laptop Per Child is a human development project. Its goal is to enable new modes of thinking and interacting through providing a currently unavailable toolset. Intel could view this as seeding a huge new market for laptop computers. At some point, after sufficient development, it’s possible that these new consumers would chose to buy a commercial laptop (and experience the joy of Windows). Intel has decided that One Laptop Per Child is a lost sales opportunity. Of course it’s also possible that the entire developing world might begin to view personal computing as an entitlement.

Our current computing environment in the developed world is a active market of products converging on a set of devices. Some pieces are purchased from commercial vendors, others are shareware or freeware, and more and more software is a service acquired through the network. One Laptop Per Child creates a ecosystem where all local hard drive based pieces are free. There’s a large upside for web-based applications, but there’s little opportunity for Intel in that category.

The One Laptop Per Child program has put a spotlight on the largely ignored markets of the developing world. But are they really markets yet? Perhaps it’s only if One Laptop Per Child is successful that markets for technology will start to emerge.

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