I was interviewed by Bambi Francisco on Reality TV for her Net Sense collumn, which leaves me a little explaining to do. In Bambi's other life she is hosting a Reality show on personal finance, which is admirable because the topic really should be taught in high school. Its a far cry from the Extreme Makeover meets Miss USA atrocity I was subjected to last night. Allow me to subject you to a little network theory on Reality without getting into the metaphysical...
The Web-based reality showsOn another note, here's something else to think about: There is already some form of reality-styled programming on the Web.
"Blogging is the biggest reality show on the Web," said Ross Mayfield, a prolific blogger, and founder of Socialtext, an open-source software company. There are 2.3 million Weblogs watched, according to Technorati. This has grown exponentially, said Mayfield.
Mayfield pointed out that mobile blogging is just a foretaste of a virtual-blog reality-like TV show. Because of the popularity of camera phones, and the ability to publish a photo on an Internet page directly from your phone, a person can practically create his or her own reality show frame by frame. Check out: Joi Ito's mobile blog.
Pretty soon, we'll have video blogs as well. "If video phones gain greater popularity, you may have the possibility of video blogging," said Mayfield. "The cost of generating content and distribution has fallen so much that anyone can create a movie, or a journal about their lives."
This quote points to how the cost of production has fallen, but not how production value is created.
Low Cost High Ratings
Reality TV is the ultimate combination of Low Cost and High Ratings for the broadcast industry. Sarnoffs law makes the the value of a broadcast network equal to the number of subscribers. The problem with this structure is the single point of failure, the one in the one to many. Often its a victim of its own success. When talent becomes fameous because of a broadcast, demand for rebroadcast grows and with each iteraction the price of talent inflates. Reality TV avoids this cycle both by hiring expedible amateurs.
There is still production value (and cost) for Reality TV. A family friend was contestant on Average Joe. One thing she pointed out was, in reality, the girls got along great, which was upsetting to the producers and they framed the story as one of contention and cat fights.
Reality is very boring except for extreme moments. Watch a Big Brother webcam (supposedly the archtypal blend of TV and the Internet for this genre, recently eclipsed by American Idol's augmentation, including SMS) and you will spend most of your time waiting for someting to happen. Its similar to how our memories are more interesting than what occured, we recall moments of emotion. Production uses episodic framing and timeshifting to edit chunks of reality into narrative, similar to how broadcast news media adds value through the editorial process. Doc views the editorial process as one of reductive choices:
So much of the mainstream news world is stuck in OR mentality, or what Deborah Tannen called The Argument Culture. Clash of ideas. Extremes yelling at each other. Binary choices, or worse, reductive choices (which is what American Idol, Survivor and the rest of Reality TV seems to be about).
The contest model of Reality TV which American Idol idealizes selectively involves the audience in determining what is of value at carefully screened points in the production process. Before a vote is cast, the talent has gone pro.
Low Cost High Value
Similar to Reality broadcast, networked Reality benefits from a low cost structure. Talent is a cheap as it comes. Blogs and media production tools like iLife come at the cheap. Part of the mass ametuerization of everything, intially publishing, is that low production and distribution costs increase the number of producers, which changes everything.
For the networked industry, a different model is required for attention as high ratings only hold as a proxy for value when there is little choice. The value of the network can be measured by Metcalfe's law where the value is the number of nodes or Reed's Law where its the value of groups. Unlike broadcast, amateur producers are motivated by more than ratings/ad dollars. They can monetize, if they so seek, in a multitude of ways. But not at scale, yet, nor do they need to in most cases. Incentives lie for production for niche and transitive audiences instead of mass audiences. Networked Reality's incentives for production are in what is high value for both producer and user.
The problem is this low cost means high volume and the need for filters to sift through what is largely crap by traditional standards. This is where models of emergent social filtering are showing promise.
First of all, attention management is driven by Pull models instead of Push. Which means that if something is produced and distributed and nobody knows its available it doesn't consume anyones attention. This is not to say it doesn't exist, in fact, its adding value by not taxing others. The most valuable feature of a news aggregator is the ability to unsubscribe.
Second, attention drives attention. Like the pheremone trails of ants, remixing, cross-posting and linking pass memes along. Something that doesn't work with the broadcast IP regimes and network structures. You don't have to subscribe to everything to assure you will receive the best content, just sources that are akin to your editorial taste, to let them do the filtering for you. Half the production value in this model is as simple as pointing to something with good judgement.
Third, attention is shared. This isn't a broadcast and consume model, its conversational. See Cluetrain, et. al.
Fourth, media organizations can play a role in this model. The role is as a cultivator and indexer. MoveOn's Bush in 30 seconds allowed amateurs to contribute and let an emergent voting process determine the top candidates (the organization had final say on what would bleed into the broadcast world, but then again, the broadcast world had the final final say). Note this differs from the American Idol variety because instead of being reductive, its additive and combinatorial, as in when something merits attention according to attention its added to an index.
I want my Networked TV. However, current manifestations of video blogs suck. The problem is how to aggregate, link deep into the time stream, contribute proxies for attention, and most importantly -- reaggregate into a viewing experience shaped by ants crawling all over your remote control.
Our Reality is differrent from Their Reality because we own it, produce it and distribute it. A value more social than ratings.
