In the end, its the story that counts

In the spirit of cross-domain thinking, I am going to depart from the archives domain because I'd like to blog about the The Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture by Anthony Lilley, Chief Exec of Magic Lantern entitled The Me in Media which was on the TV last week. I just thought it was quite an interesting take on television and where communication and 'conversation' is going - very relevant to the world that us information professionals now inhabit. Anthony Lilley talked about three main features of media: networks and interactivity, which are both changing radically, and also the power of narrative, which is eternal. I can't say that I've got any great insights into how archivists fit into all of this but certainly our role is about communication and about preserving stories and narratives for the future. A child of today will become the 'still centre of their own web of media', choosing what to create, when and where, and most of this will be interactive. We will all still be making sense of the world and constructing stories, but this will have a great deal less to do with the mass media and very little of what there is will be broadcast in the traditional sense. In the future we may look back at the arrival of TV as an incremental change to broadcasting, whereas we are now at start of change in type, not in scale. Lilley suggested that TV has not got to grips with the magnitude of this change. It is vital that TV starts to engage more fully with the interactive world, going well beyond the ‘red button’ of the remote control and really thinking imaginatively about being interactive. In the early days of television the elite was very much in control, but now that is becoming a thing of the past. We can now create and share media ourselves so that we are in control: we are in the age of social media. For media companies this may be worrying and threatening, and Lilley believed that only a few are really seeing the opportunities. For the public, we are going beyond traditional broadcasting and it all feels pretty exciting. But whatever the means, we still need shared stories to bond us together. The important thing is making meaning, not the technology required, and the broadcasting media need to remember this. In the beginning broadcasting was formal, and the audience was almost deferential. But then ordinary people started to appear on the screen in fly-on-the-wall documentaries such as ‘The Family’(1970s). Lilley referred to Swap Shop (a personal nostalgic TV trip for me!) as a precursor to eBay, which does kind of make sense when you think about it. Equally, Tony Hart's art programme Hartbeat (or the great Vision On if you are old enough to remember it) , which each week showed a gallery of art sent in by children, might be seen as a precursor to sites like Flickr. Of course, the Web now enables anyone to share their masterpieces of art with everyone at anytime. So there were some early participatory shows and TV has continued this idea of people participation, especially in the form of game shows and laterly reality TV shows, with audiences voting for who stays and who goes on a huge scale (although this has gone rather sour of late for the BBC with the scandals about faking winners and so on). And meanwhile computers have been getting in on the act. Lilley showed an excerpt from a programme about one of the earliest computer games (the earliest one?), known in the UK as ‘Ping’ but apparently called ‘Pong’ in the US. This incredibly simple (to us now) tennis type game was very popular at the time. Basic as it was, the user was in control of what happened on the screen. We moved through PacMan and the like to games that you could actually play on your own TV! This shift in the uses to which screens are put has changed our relationship to TV Its status has become more another domestic appliance rather than something at the heart of the home. Lilley said that TV has tried to cross breed with computers with mixed results. He gave the example of The Adventure Game (1980s) which I think he thought didn't work that well, although I really liked it at the time (I seem to remember an old man who was an aspidistra and a vortex that they the contestants had to try to cross). By the standards of 1980s pretty much everone is computer savvy now. Many of us have broadband and most children have a great deal of experience of using computers and see themselves as in control of their media. Lilley felt that the concept of the channel is out of date. ‘Channel controllers’ have the power over the channel, but maybe both channels and control are on the way out. Interactivity and the power of the web go way beyond trying to emulate TV, but still it is important to remember that the Internet is a communication network first and a content delivery network second, which again comes back to stories and conversations. The importance of broadcasters to new creative work, ideas and stories is still very strong. But broadcasting is a one-way technology and now we have a network where everyone can communicate and also form an infinite number of groups within a massive network. Broadcasters need to help this happen and not inhibit it. Lilley concluded that programme makers need to think about what really makes programmes resonate with the audience and his recommendation was to make less TV but make better TV. Broadcasters need to get to grips with the way that stories come together in the networked interactive world. We are on the brink of a revolution that will see how we communicate ideas re-balance itself again the mass media world that most of us have grown up with. We will probably look back at the mass media age as the exception. New technologies are creating an adaptive, complex network of conversations, much like real social life! Social media presents great opportunites and new challenges. How we make sense of the world, how we create stories, how we share our ideas are all being turned upside down. And they are being turned upside down by us – the people formally known as the audience!