4IP: New Channel 4 Fund
The audience as participants
The audience as participants from David Wilcox on Vimeo.
Stuart Cosgrove, Channel 4’s head of programmes (nations and regions), explains that their new 4IP fund - which he helped to develop - is “probably one of the biggest single interventions in publicly useful social media in Britain”.
It will bring a change in the culture of Channel 4 from traditional top-down broadcaster, to a media company where what used to be the audience are participants in the creation of new content, together making a major social impact.
He says:
One of the objectives is to create an entirely new connective opportunity in media, and one of the things that we will be trying to do is bring about a step change in our own thinking and go through that a significant phase of cultural renewal in Channel 4.
Channel 4, because of its roots in television broadasting, has probably traditionally seen communication from a top-down view … and clearly within web-enabled social media almost the reverse is true. So I think that for us 4IP is not only that we can do more with other people as partners, it requires us to radically transform the means by which we distribute, produce, work, and solicit information and ideas - it is a really, really big opportunity.
Channel 4 has always managed to occupy a unique place in British contemporary popular culture in that that we are required by the process of how we raise money to be commercially motivated and thinking, but we have a very important public license to discharge. I think that the interface of the commercial and public is at the core of what’s different about channel 4, and therefore what’s different about 4IP.
We want things that are socially and publicly useful, we want things that are challenging, we want things that connect to a bigger wider audience of people - so it has to be that connectivity that is important.
We don’t want to be making merely niche media for its own sake. We want to have an impact, and that impact means that people will feel fired. But of course firing people’s imagination means you have to touch their soul, their hearts, their creative juices - you have to make them part of the story.
They can make the story for you - they are not only partners, but participants … sometimes they can do things that overwhelm you, sometimes they can do things that sneak up behind you - and that’s what’s exciting about the new media - that it cannot be centrally controlled by one authoring principle.
Stuart added that the fundamental distinction between the broadcaster and the audience is eroding. People are no long just the consumers of content, but rather participants in the creation of content. They have the means to produce own content from their desktop which previously required studios, expensive equipment and an engineering infrastructure.
See also Channel 4 invites ideas for funding
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“firing people’s imagination means you have to touch their soul, their hearts, their creative juices”……
……I love this phrase. Touching another’s soul is as close to perfect communication as it gets.
Isn’t it true to say that quality of life is quality of communication?
Professor Robin Dunbar in “Grooming Gossip and the Evolution of Language” argues that language itself developed from the touching observed in animal grooming. The physical grooming sensation actually raises opiate levels and increases our feeling of well being. It evolved into human language as group sizes expanded. Ultimately language reproduced the same “safe or sexy” reflexes which were the functions of touch.
Social Media, with all the advantages of reach and immediacy, lack the emotional “touchy feely” feedback loop of face to face or broadcast media - there is limited eye contact, no physical touch,no suggestive background music and tone of voice is often lacking. This limits the degree to which soulful dialogue can be generated. Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame has called this cyberdisinhibition. Without the limiters of natural emotional feedback, online dialogue can stray into uncomfortable territory.
The blunt Linkedin question “Will you recommend me to a friend?” when asked online is threatening - if I say no then will I lose a friend - if I say yes will I compromise myself. The context limits my ability to handle it smoothly. It is too extreme a question to ask early in a relationship yet the medium prompts users to ask it straight away.
In order to overcome these shortcomings and to make online dialogue more engaging proxies need to be found for the emotional feedback loop. Dunbar argues that the most efficient and engaging form of dialogue is gossip I think gossip or small talk obeys certain rules - it is always Relevant to the deliverer and recipient and usually affects important issues. Intimate in that its’ content is specific to the parties. Timely in that it is delivered in or around the point when it has most value and it is Executable - someting can be done about it. I call this the RITE model of communication.
RITE mimics gossip and the concept of short sharp bursts of intensely personal and helpful information lends itself to the Social Networking medium.
High quality “small talk” builds up the three key elements of genuinely engaging dialogue which are Empathy, Delivery and Advocacy. Put simply - does the person I am in dialogue with understand my needs, Do they regularly meet my needs and Would I talk about them positively to others.
Observing the principles of gossip in online dialogue will help in creating a medium with a more human touch and feel.
It is possible to build proxies for Empathy, Satisfaction in Delivery and Advocacy into onlne relationships by asking participants to rate simple statements out of a score of 1 - 10. This can be done regularly and in a non threatening way. This approach is less challenging than a full on question “Will you tell our friends how much fun I am” and adds shades of meaning to the dialogue which is more like the real life response to such a question.
The appearance of key words in dialogue also indicate if the relationship being established is moving towards warmth, engagement and understanding or away towards confusion, misalignment and rupture not rapture.
The emerging media has already found proxies for emotion - emoticons, SMS argot, video-mail etc. which are proving that we have the creativity and the demand is there is replicate full function dialogue.
Social Media + Emotional Engagement + Predictive Metrics of Engagement must be communications nirvana - low cost, global 1:1 dialogue with instant feedback about the extent to which heart and soul have been touched.
As advertisers seek to move their spend away from print and broadcast, as politicians seek to engage voters in the political process, as activists seek to draw attention to wrongs or new possibilities the power of emotional engagement through near human feedback via web 2.0 applications seems irresistible.
Advertisers, politicians and activists will all in the end want to see value for money and Engagement Metrics will like TV ratings or Opinion Polls become a working necessity.
The debate about what can and should be measure and how is the debate I most wish to advance at 2gether08 because the sooner these imaginative tools move from the innovator and early adopter phase to mainstream useage the sooner we will see quality communication improve everyone’s quality of life.
The expression “You are only as good as what you measure” was a mantra of my old employers and billionaire philanthropists Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard - we must set the agenda in order to influence the outcome!
Thanks for reading…see you at 2gether08.
Baglady says: ‘Really GREAT news, channel 4. The sooner the better. The whole world’s waiting for this.