Wikipedia writes

In this episode Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand‘s ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan. Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928 and worked for Cecil B. DeMille, where she got some of the plot for what became The Fountainhead from this period. Later she moved to New York, and set up a reading group called The Collective where they considered her work. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.

When published, although critically savaged, Rand’s Objectivist ideas were popular and came to heavily infiltrate California, particularly Silicon Valley. The computer utopian belief (Californian Ideology) that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become ‘Randian heroes’, only working for their own happiness, became more widespread.

The programme concludes that, indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.

You can view the release dates (here) And its fabulous.

The African film industry is one of the oldest – with its roots in Ain el Ghezel (The Girl of Carthage), which was produced in Tunisia by Chemama Chikly in 1924. M-Net has spent the last three years negotiating the rights to almost 600 works in English, French, Arabic and Portuguese and digitally remastering them.

The library forms an important archive of the continent’s cultural cinematic heritage, and also, for the first time, makes the African artists’ works easily accessible by a wide viewership around the globe – creating a new audience for existing and emerging filmmakers.

The library consists of award-winning works from more than 80 producers including Senegalese Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Mambety, Yousef Chahine from Egypt and Haile Gerima from Ethiopia.

I would love to play a video that explains the concept but for some reason the embed is corrupted

What does this mean? It means that media in the networked society is about connecting people up to information that is uniquely relevant to them – this is something that I have been thinking about for some time now, and the economic model that starts to evolve back to the millennial insights as to how true markets thrive. Underpinning that social connection and interaction is data, huge dollops of the stuff which will enable us to bundle, filter, aggregate, point to, link to, share, embed, and trade. It then becomes social business.

This is the mitochondria (cellular respiration – key to all life) of networked economics. (here)

Thanks to Arjan of Freedom Lab for the hat tip

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7236030@N03/2106087852

As Jenkins explains,

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the idea form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced into a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction.

The consequences of such transmedia manifestations is; the creation of deeper context, and a more sustained form of emotional and intellectual engagement that translates into commercial success. What the  Wachowski brothers recognised, was that we experience the world as a blended reality, and that blended reality also embraced a more participatory culture. The success of The Matrix was premised upon the idea of co-creation and collective intelligence. “Echo replies to echo, everything reverberates’” said Braque.

The filmmakers plant clues that won’t make sense until we play the computer game. They draw on the back story revealed through a series of animated shorts, which need to be downloaded off the web of watched off a separate DVD. Fans raced, dazed and confused, from the theatres to plug into Internet discussion lists, where every detail would be dissected and every possible interpretation debated.

The Matrix comic

The Matrix online

Would not such insight inspire brands and businesses to understand how to truly engage their; customers, audiences, stakeholders? The Matrix is a…. Film? A comic? An online game? A…. Brand? And what do great brands do? They tell great stories, and they deliver great customer experience and engagement.

You can live a life or you can live a FantaLife

A few years ago, SMLXL was commissioned by The Coca Cola Company to globally look at their brand Fanta. How would SMLXL re-energise Fanta? How could we use the idea of Engagement and not use just traditional practices of brand communications. Our view was that Fanta had to have a point of view on life for young people. So we created FantaLife: an advanced living course for young people to get more out of life.

You can live a life or you can live a Fanta Life

Which we thought was far more engaging, than the tempting colourful sensations of life. I had not read Henry’s book then, but based on the communications work I had undertaken, and our research of how companies, brands and organisations are able to engage their audiences creating great experiences for them. We could prove such an approach enabled those companies to be highly profitable. This seemed to us @ SMLXL, rather obvious.

Fanta Life Challenge: What are you doing with you life?

From live events, to mobile communications, a TV series, to what we described as Fanta Beach: we created a world in which young people could have a great deal of fun. The premise and promise of Engagement is about deep context achieved through co-creation, collaboration and Transmedia storytelling. It has by default socialbility woven  into the entire fabric of the marketing communications. But its not social media. This is something that Ridley Scott has also understood: Crowdsourcing Blade Runner in a read-write participatory culture

Check out the Purefold project with RSA films

Fanta paid us handsomely for the work, then they made a couple of TV spots and some billboards and ran them internationally. I was somewhat bemused, and I still am, that companies on one level compete so aggressively, and must by law maximise shareholder value, are unable to innovate to do so. And, in so doing they hurt themselves. Social media now becomes another silo of the marketing silo bucket and the cycle continues. OK Fanta is an orange drink that Coke bought off the Germans after the Second World War – but in my view one we were proposing to imbue the brand with real meaning, based upon our deep insight of how young people want to engage, want to co-create, what to explore the world in a more existentialist way. TV ads, on their own, will not crack that code.

Fanta beach: a transmedia story

Brands need to be multi-dimensional – like Apple, or The Matrix to survive the participatory culture of the multi-dimensional universe. SMLXL has developed a Masterclass on Engagement – do get in touch if you would like to know how to truly engage your customers in; the physical, the mobile, as well as the virtual life.

In the meantime, Fanta Life is still there waiting to be executed! But perhaps Coke doesn’t want to be as famous as the Matrix?

The Matrix was first released on March 31, 1999. It earned $171 million in North America and over £250 million in the UK and $463 million worldwide,^[10] and later became the first DVD to sell more than three million copies in the U.S.^[11] The Ultimate Matrix Collection was released on HD DVD on May 22, 2007^[12] and on Blu-ray on October 14, 2008.^[13] The movie is also scheduled to be released stand alone in a 10th anniversary edition on Blu-ray in the Digibook format on March 31, 2009, 10 years to the day after the movie was released theatrically.^[14]

SB: Right now there seems to be a lot of confusion between social media and the definition of community. The idea of community is right now as fairly elusive one and is being bandied about like it’s some sacrosanct term. Community built around consumption is, for me fairly transitory. It reminds of an unruly mob during the time of the Paris Commune. We’re  not going to get a whole lot of sense out of this right now.

Then there’s these dire warnings coming from people like Forrester, that brands will be excluded from consumer choice because somehow they are now being defined by communities and no longer by the brand owners themselves. I think this is both disingenuous and untrue. Forcing brands out of their hands via social media created communities is only part of the story. While even as early as 2005 Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore warned marketers, in their prescient work ‘Communities Dominate Brands‘, that if they didn’t cut loose the shackles of the traditional advertising agency and TV network model they would lose their brands. I’m seeing many of the same warnings again this year, particularly in the wake of the great financial crisis. But what real, if any, changes have we seen to this paradigm? No brands have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t have a social media strategy or because they continued advertising in traditional media.

JB: Brands may not fall by the wayside as such, but brands will become stronger because of their consumer engagement strategies. For example, the well known Dell Hell scenario certainly impacted on that organisation negatively, but by engaging with the community they came back stronger and more relevant to their client base. If they hadn’t done that who knows where that organisation would have been.

Some brands come to social media like Dell in a ‘reactive’ fashion knowing they now need to engage with consumers due to a negative event/issue. Other brands initiate the online engagement strategy ‘proactively’, understanding it will add value to their knowledge base, understanding the client better, product development and customer service.

SB: Ahonen and Moore predicted the consumer and their connected communities, would select the products and brands that are engaged in the most relevant dialogue with them. Somehow this would become the centre of a new modern and sustainable marketing model. While I think there are some massive shifts occurring,  I don’t think we’re quite there yet with this because I’m not sure anyone understands these kinds of ROIs yet.

Metrics, metrics, metrics. I can’t count so I am unable to help, but the fact is one can see where commerce is to be made, if one digs around a bit. And the big question is what is advertising and marketing in the 21st Century? When we live in a search economy, a participatory culture, where 25% of al media is made by us and there are 3.5 billion mobile phones of the planet. Networked economics?

Some called Tomi and I polemicists – I like to think we highlighted something critically important for brands, business and organisations. Remember our subtitle was, “business and marketing challenges for the 21st Century”. This went way beyond in my view the social media paradigm that so many are so now engaged in.

James Boyle presents ideas around his book The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind at the RSA in March this year. Download the book.

Fascinating stuff, and I was very glad that we got to shake hands and have a good chat too.

Gerds argument is that the global economic fabric has changed. He then proceeds to ask, if the theme is Transformation, then a good question is…

ARE OUR ASSUMPTIONS STILL VALID?

And the language we use to describe information, and media organisation, consumption, discovery and retrival is also different, words such as:

1. Bundle
2. Filter
3. Aggregate
4. Curate
5. Contextualize
6. Personalize
7. Offer a ‘Home’

And so our world does not look like this anymore, and to Gerds point, so our assumptions must evolve as we as a society transform. We are currently building a new content eco-system says Gerd, I say it is a new socio-economic model for the networked society.

The future says Gerd is the Cloud and the Crowd. More on Cloud computing And the “user experience” becomes the primary objective, and I could not agree more. He also describes the point that deep collaboration between vendors will enable them to realise revenues on the battleground of attention economics.

Key words for this new ecology…

[1] Trust [2]  Transparency [3]  Conversation [4] Collaboration

All fundamental needs of the human species for survival. Not that the banking system seems keen on any of these particular topics, and there’s the rub, Social media = social revolution. Like Gutenberg ushered in the Enlightenment. We are in fact challenging the fixed orthodoxies of the toxic end of our industrial mass consumer society that benefits very few at the expense of the many. Always a recipe for something slightly more exciting than watching Eastenders.

Just watch Lawrence Lessig in action… Vimeo below and here a keynote similar to the one he gave at sxsw that resulted in a standing ovation.

Lawrence Lessig from Doug MacMillan on Vimeo.

And here is a more in depth explanation of her extraordinary project

Armstrong, the daughter of BBC human rights documentary producer Peter, comes from the first environmentally aware generation. Her film does not seek, like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, to prove climate change is happening. Narrative, not just facts, she believes, is needed to make people understand what is at stake. writes John Vidal. For me what is interesting is that Franny is a No Straight Line thinker and doer. She subverted the obstacles placed before her in making, producing and distributing her story.

For example

They bypassed the banks and went straight to ordinary people for cash, developing the idea of “crowd-funding”. The first £50,000 was raised in a London bar on a single night in December 2004, and the £530,000 raised so far has come from 228 people who have invested between £500 and £35,000 each. There are still seven £10,000 shares available.

Aside from a few relatively wealthy people, many investors are made up of groups. There’s a mothers’ group, a hockey team and a women’s health centre. The investors will get their money back if the film takes £1m. “Our lawyer said it was the most original film-funding scheme he’d seen,” says Armstrong.

In addition to the innovative funding model, Stupid has broken new ground by relying on volunteers to translate the film into more than 30 languages.

Often, I have made the observation that in the networked society, and in a world where we are reaching to find those things that mean the most to us, that people will form groups around:

[1] Passions

[2] Values

[3] Desires

The power, and potential of this type of organisation is called Group Forming Networks, described by David Reed

As the scale increases, what’s important also shifts. When Sarnoff’s Law dominates, content such as TV programs is king. When Metcalfe’s Law kicks in, transactions are king. When the Group-Forming Law takes hold, communities are king.

And even the distribution model is also based upon an No Straight Line approach, “The usual film model is that the distributor pays the producer a pittance called an advance – and for that takes all rights to the film. Which means it belongs to them. If the filmmaker wants to have a screening of the film, they have to get permission from the distributor. So we came up with a new model whereby we employ the distributor, we keep all the rights, the money goes through us and we pay them a cut. This means we will be able to allow all sorts of small-scale school/church/campaign screenings which are not usually possible.” The film is not only being premiered in the UK but beamed to 65 cinemas around the world simultaneously which means

If Armstrong gets her way, which she usually does, The Age of Stupid will be seen by 250 million or more people in the run up to the crucial UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December and will inspire an army of people to force world governments to take action.

This also got me thinking about communities and identity and also the idea of what Henry Jenkins describes as Spreadable Media.

And as Richard Sennett wrote we want to

recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time. We want the shared ability for work to teach us how to govern ourselves and to connect to other citizens on common ground.

Dave Cushman wrote a very engaging piece The great disruption of social networks reaches its tipping point which accompanies this very well.