TIPTOE

This week’s reading is the report, A World of Differences, by Chris Lederer and Medan Brownlow (above image is from this report). The report outlines the shifts in the global Entertainment and Media (E&M) industry that are occurring/will occur in the next 5 years, and how businesses can strategize in order to make the most of these shifts.

The shifts that the report identifies as particularly influential to Entertainment and Media are: demography, competition, consumption, geography and business models. The report goes through these shifts, providing evidence to arguments, and concludes that Entertainment and Media companies should be aware of these shifts when making plans for the future.

The most interesting thing that I found from this reading was learning about the Entertainment and Media industry in a global context. I was vaguely aware of the growing E&M industries in developing countries, such as Nigeria, and in my Australian Cinema course I learnt about the Chinese film industry, box office and co-productions with Australia, but seeing the growth of places like China and India in comparison to America is pretty amazing. The report notes that although the industry is becoming more global, cultures and tastes are still remaining local. I wonder if that will ever change, and I will be able to watch Kenyan content in Australia, and whether increased globalisation with increase people’s consumption of foreign media, or whether it will continue to push them to seek local content. I’d like to think that in the future more people would know more languages and consume media from around the world more often, or maybe the US will stop being the global force in Entertainment and Media, and instead everyone will be watching Chinese blockbusters at Hoyts 😉 But I suppose there are a lot of sociological reasons why that won’t be the case anytime soon…

Week one has been a great introduction to Media 6 and I am very excited for this semester and the future-focused topics we have started discussing.

Firstly, the Schwab reading, which I wrote about in this blogpost, taught me a lot about what is going on now in technology, what could happen in the future, and how it may impact humans.

Then Astrid Scott of ABC’s Research and Development team came to our lecture and got me thinking about how the fourth industrial revolution impacts the media industry specifically.

After the lecture we broke up into groups and had a discussion about experiences to do with interactivity, simulation, immersion and virtual/augmented reality. The result was the brain map pictured above.

One idea that I have been mulling over since these events is the possibility of 24 hour personal live feeds to social media, so that people can see what you are doing at all times, and privacy will be out the window, but it will be given up voluntarily. Already people use GPS on their phones to check in where they are on facebook or instagram, snapchat videos of themselves to select friends, or upload live videos to facebook of what they are doing. The idea of a 24 hour feed came from Dave Eggers novel, The Circle, where an employee at a large tech company (like google) is used an experiment in a live feed to social media (at all hours except sleeping), and people around the world became interested in her and what she was doing. The novel explored how she changed her behaviour when the cameras were attached, and how she changed her behaviour when she realised that people were watching and commenting.

Another thing that I have been thinking about is Pokemon Go and whether it will ever occur that virtual reality will move out into the streets, so that you can walk around living like you are in gameplay. Of course you would have to get around security issues. Perhaps this could also be applied to travel, so that you walk around a city, but using virtual reality technology, it feels like you are walking around a different city, and on holiday.

I am unsure of what kind of topics we will pick in my tutorial, but at this point everything is very interesting and worth exploring.