Screen is the new window

When I asked Kartik (9) about his favourite cartoon character he talked about Tom & Jerry for not more than two minutes. From there on he started telling me about his new love - Master Chief of Halo. I was confused, this Halo thing was new to me, but seeing the kind of passion with which he started narrating the story of Halo made me sit back and listen. Kartik even said that if I looked at it once, I would get hooked!

At the end of that, thirty minute long, exchange, where I barely had anything to say, Kartik whisked me to his mom. As we stood at the Kitchen door he told his mother (and my cousin) that ‘I’ wanted to see his new game. She smiled and nodded. Next I knew I was being all but dragged towards the bedroom where stood the family computer.
He switched it on and put the Game CD in. His uncle had bought this CD for him from Delhi.
As the computer warmed up into some graphic activity I was amazed by Kartik’s involvement with the game. What hit me next was the sheer refinement of what I saw on the screen.

Here was a graphics-rich battle filed with background score that reminded me of Star War movies. It almost seemed that Kartik and I were entering a movie where he was an intergalactic warrior, saving the earthlings from the Covenant scum (Covenants are the bad guys in Halo!).
I wanted to see more of this but soon my parents called for me, as we were to leave. Kartik could not come out to see me off for he was too busy kicking some Covenant Asses with his plasma pistol. He just waived me bye and asked me to bring my laptop next time, for we could then play together. He even suggested that I SMS him my mail ID & IM on his dad’s cell so that we could know if we got online together. He said if I got the CD we could even play together.
Outside I met my cousin who did not look as surprised as I sounded while telling her about what I had just witnessed. She went on telling us how this was Kartik’s usual way of getting to play his games on the days that he is not allowed to. Get the guests as the shield and get on with the game!

As we drove off I was left wondering about that incredible world of Halo, a world that Kartik was a part of. To me Halo almost looked like a Cray in front of an Abacus, when I compared it to the Atari console that I had bought for myself in 1991.

This exchange was in Kota (Rajasthan) while I was holidaying at my parent’s place. The holidays got over and I was back in Mumbai but the thoughts did not leave me. As Kartik would have said ‘I was hooked’! But my thoughts did not stop at Halo. What interested me even more was Kartik’s effortless interface with Internet, Mobile phones & Games. I began thinking about these three. As I dug deeper trying to talk to some young boys in Mumbai & Delhi and checking if Kartik was an exception I was amazed by what I found. Not only was Kartik a part of a ‘emerging convention’ but there was a whole new world that was taking shape in the form of the ‘new electronic media’.

About 49 million Indians were SMSing in 2004 but & this is only about 60% of what it was in 2005 (75 million!).
Great growth I would say.
I have another number - 0.84 million.
This is the Broadband subscriber base in India in 2005. But as this figure also bloats, it would, like mobile phones, contribute to the creation of what I see as the new India.

This new India is worthy of about seven A4 pages of description that follows because among other things it would dramatically impact the nature of work of people in the content creation & content communication industry.

As the big three bloat (Mobile Phone Ownership, PC Penetration & Household Broadband Connectivity) we would start to see the impact of the biggest transformation in the creation & consumption of information & entertainment since the advent of Television.

The first wave of this adoption of new media has been lead by time-poor busy executives, also, businesspersons, professionals etc.
A still bigger wave of disruptive & discontinuous change would hit our personal & professional life when we begin to interact with an entire crop of young boys & girls who have grown up with multiple media at home.
I like to call them the DownLads (and this is unisex please!).

DownLads would have been groomed & grown to expect at least three kinds of media sources viz. the classical TV (Broadcast), Mobile Phones & Webspace (My-cast: Content created by me).
Webspace would also offer content beyond My-cast viz. ‘Community-cast’ – content created by my community & ‘Crowd-cast’ – content created by other communities that I do not belong to.
How new is the world of DownLads to us, is evident in the sheer absence of terms to define many things that I am writing here. For want of vocabulary I am attempting to create one!

DownLads are the future representatives of the time-poor busy executives, professionals etc that we discussed earlier. Their world would be, as I recently read in Newsweek, a never-ending cocktail party where they would always be looking over their virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner.
The important word here is conversation. The future of content has a lot to do with this. Today content is predominantly storylines & mostly the content creators control these storylines. But the world of DownLads would see content that is a result of these storylines blending with an ever-increasing spiral of conversations about & around these storylines.

Conversations represent technology’s gift to media, or should I say technology’s gift to the end user. This gift is Control & Freedom. User is able to control the content & is free to express & share his own viewpoint. I usually refer to these two as ‘the paradoxical twins’. Together they are new media’s singular point of departure & advantage over the traditional broadcast format.

In the world of new media, DownLads would look at the screen and the life, that they lead, as interchangeable. Everything on the screen would be downloadable & uploadable – totally modifiable.

The DownLad would want to co-create. And the present day content creators would at best turn into Content Facilitators or plain Digital Pimps!

As content ‘creators’, I do not know if we are ready to accept this ‘fate’ yet.
Why we might not be ready could, perhaps, be explained partly by the fact that pace of change of technology has far exceeded the pace of change of content that runs on this technology.
Look at the way we market or advertise on a mobile phone. We just send an unsolicited & intrusive text message. Or worst still call people as per our convenience. Our intrusive marketing mindset, which is a legacy of our broadcast past, propels us to continue to behave in the same fashion in a new context, which tolerates anything but intrusion.

The future would not be about “Did you watch this last night?” Instead it would be more about “What did you make of your third date’s video, over the weekend?”
It would increasingly be a world of consumer-generated content where the ‘expert content creators’ would just help from sidelines. And creation would be perhaps measured in Giga Bytes (GBs) of memory space that one has consumed on one’s personal processing device.

DownLads would not just seek control over the content, but the freedom to consume it free of barriers erected by Time & Space. Thus media & content that would surround them, almost organically, would qualify as the preferred choice.

Interestingly the rise & rise of Radio in recent times perhaps owes its success to this among other factors.
Radio is the ultimate ‘attention deficit compliant’ content medium. It frees us to ‘think’ of other things and yet it makes us ‘feel’ while it plays almost like a background score to our heavily multitasked lives.

This brings us to a critical assumption. Does this mean that content and/or media that demands fewer of our senses, at a time, would gain valuable share in the future?
I think yes.
This rule though, like any rule, has an exception.
The above would not hold true only in cases where the user is actually inside the content. Now this could be anything – from a basic reality show to real role-playing video game.

As electronic media would expand from TV to Webspace & Mobile Space it would create more complexity. For example it would be both important and yet very difficult to explain as to which of the above mentioned three electronic media channels would be the primary address of the DownLads.
Which media would be their base station?
Would it be the Web or the Mobile or TV?
This question might cease to exist if convergence becomes so pure that for all of us end up having just one physical device that does it all.
Even in that one device, I am curious, which ‘media-band’ would DownLads spend more time with?
At this stage we might witness a fragmentation within DownLads. There might be multiple or at least two to three varieties that might emerge, basis their usage habits.

The other interesting shift that new media would bring is Agelessness. The reality of a 10 year old behaving like a 15 year old, a 15 year old behaving like a 25 year old a 45 year old behaving like a 25 year old would see itself manifest in its purest form.
While there could be multiple segments of DownLads basis their usage habits, there would be fewer segments basis their age.

We might finally have just two kinds of DownLads - the teens & the young adults! Everyone would continue to grow up, but no one would grow old!

While content creators have their own challenges, advertisers would get a bigger share of this challenge. Advertisers effectively, create content that nobody wants to consume! As advertisers would move into the era DownLads they would have two key challenges facing them –
Where to say the ‘ad thing’? &
How to say the ‘ad thing’?
(I am assuming that they would know what they want to say..)

Answers to these lie in our fundamental behaviour towards entertainment from our ‘caveman days’.

There have always been three basic human entertainment experiences viz.
1. Gaming
2. Music
3. Story Telling

At a basic level advertisers & marketers could start with these.
How can I turn my brand story into an interesting gaming experience, an experience rich in storyline & layered with music that moves! Something that the user is prompted to engage in, at a very personal level. Any brand experience that would hybridize two or more of these three key entertainment experiences would have a rising stock in the DownLad perceptual index.

It is important to note that a by gaming experience definitely does not mean ‘I need my brand’s Tetris!’ Instead is about building games with intricate plotlines that engage the user, just like a good insight or idea used to engage the DownLad, in a TV Commercial.
In other words insights & ideas would now need a new output, other than just a TVC.

All this and many related ‘social plate shifts’, that surpass any expert’s speculative brilliance, are imminent.
By when would all this happen? I feel that they are just as far into the future as, a mobile phone in the hands of an auto rickshaw driver was, five years ago.
Mobile phone, PC & Broadband penetration are the three primary variables that would take this change to its logical next phase.
As far as I can see into the future this wave would travel from large & concentrated population clusters to smaller and spread out population clusters.
The only challenge left is literacy. New media relies (and at least for now) on an assumption – the user is a literate. Thus illiterate population would be new-media dark. This is where traditional electronic media viz. TV & Radio would hold fort, and this only for as long as literacy is a bottleneck.
There also exists a positive correlation between literacy and prosperity. Given this I see the traditional electronic media addressing the bottom of the pyramid and this for long enough for some of us to not worry about the lack of a social security mechanism in India.
New media shall definitely take away the communication of premium products (i.e. if it has not, already begun to – How many super premium brands do we see on TV anymore?).

Again, this hypothesis would become irrelevant if technology surprises again. This could happen with the development of an intuitive interface that rids the new electronic media from the ‘have to be literate to use it’ precondition. In that event the challenge for the traditional broadcast would be still more severe.

And yes, there are different kinds of people, unsurprisingly engaged in traditional media, who have their own way of reacting to this.
Here go some of the types that I have come across:

I respect the knowledge kinds:
“Nice article.”

I do not believe in science fiction kinds:
“It would take another 50 years for this to come to India.”

Boss is impressed kinds
“This is true. Let’s sleep over it.”

Clueless kinds:
“Can we go home now?”

Preparing for DownLads kinds:

“I know, here’s what we are already doing on this..”

No matter what kind you are, let us not waste any more time in measuring the possibility of the virtual world affecting the real world. Let’s prepare for it. There is a whole army of Kartiks that is growing up in different parts of this country. We at best are under prepared for them; we fail to realize that the wave of DownLads is real.

Let’s confess that virtual is the new real & screen is the new window!

















Points not covered in this piece but would anyway make good counterpoints!

1. Traditional Broadcast is already reinventing itself – reality TV & shorter content are two examples of how this is happening

2. Need for virtual world, if we still want to refer to the web and mobile space thus, is relatively more in individualistic western societies. In Eastern societies, typified by collectivism, adoption of a parallel virtual life could be less prevalent

3. Like TV coexists with press today, all new & old media, electronic or otherwise would coexist