Have you noticed lately how often a television show you’re watching will be interrupted on the fly by a promo, a logo, or some other form of advertising? It’s gotten to the point that I can’t watch Spongebob anymore because Nickelodeon keeps running ads for upcoming shows on the lower part of the screen – which right now you’re thinking is maybe the bottom inch, but I’ve seen them take as much as the lower third of the on-screen image. Or take some of the NBA games I watched this year, which included on-screen promos during the game that momentarily flashed close to the center of the screen, forcing your eye to acknowledge them.
I mention this because I think it’s a measure of the degree to which television has been trivialized in the current offering of entertainment options. Sure, taken as a whole television itself is still popular, but there are so many channels now that the model is more like that of the magazine business than anything else. And like the magazine business, channels are struggling to attract and keep eyeballs while building a brand, because building a brand on TV means doing intrusive things like having omnipresent on-screen logos, border ads, overlays, etc.
What’s interesting about this relative to interactive entertainment is that it wasn’t that long ago that people were worrying about product placement practices in TV, and wondering if it was going to destroy the business, or save it. Well, those concerns are long gone in TV land, but they’re soon to roost in the interactive industry, which is already tipping toward licensing as a means of catching the eyeballs of those same consumers – who today have a ridiculous number of entertainment options available to them. I’m already seeing intrusive overlaid ads on pages like Gamasutra (that irritating Radeon-slime ad), and I guess I’m wondering how long it’s going to be before I fire up a piece of interactive entertainment and have to deal with an omnipresent logo in the lower right corner of my monitor while I’m playing a shooter.
When that happens, I’ll know the industry threw in the towel on suspension of disbelief. I’ll also know that the part of the industry I cared about died.
— Mark Barrett
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but might this ever-increasing ‘pollution’ of other forms of media bring people back to books—the last secure bastion of attention?
I was thinking about this just the other day, after seeing the movie ‘Legion’. It occurred to me I can count on one hand the number of new films I’ve seen in the past five years that I thought were truly excellent and worth recommending. Everything else has been a derivative or disposable entertainment, or merely an empty spectacle (*cough*Avatar*cough*). I realize ‘derivative’ and ‘disposable’ are apt descriptions of much of what’s coming out of big, traditional publishing houses as well, but in judging for some indie book contests last year, I read some of the most original work I’ve seen between two covers (or in ebook form) in decades. Some of it was too experimental to be very accessible, but it was great to see some envelope-pushing.
Ebooks are exploding and the upcoming Apple iSlate (or whatever they ultimately decide to call it) is about the most hotly anticipated device since the iPhone, in no small part due to its ereader possibilities. Ebook self-publishing is going mainstream; more and more “name” mainstream authors are electing to publish their own ebooks all the time, and many more will follow thanks to Amazon’s new 70-75% royalty offer on Kindle books. The ebook format is also giving rise to increased publication of short fiction collections and poetry—formats long thought to be near extinction in the commercial marketplace. All of this amounts to a viable channel for new voices.
Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’re on the verge of a real renaissance in literature. Stay tuned.
“Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but might this ever-increasing ‘pollution’ of other forms of media bring people back to books—the last secure bastion of attention?”
I would like to think so, but I think books are at risk of this just as much as any other form of entertainment. In fact, I think of the entire over-arching process as one which will never be resolved. Marketing will always be trying to leverage content for its own ends because it’s in marketing’s best interest to do so.
As Kassia noted in a recent post, the idea of ‘enhanced books’ is already being corrupted by this process: http://booksquare.com/what-are-enhanced-ebooks/. Instead of enhancements which augment the content of a book, publishers are salivating over enhancements which market and sell other products — meaning ads. Maybe in a decade (or two months), when you click a button on your e-reader to look at the next page of your novel, you instead get an interstitial commercial which you cannot bypass.
“It occurred to me I can count on one hand the number of new films I’ve seen in the past five years that I thought were truly excellent and worth recommending.”
I think your reaction would be true for most people over thirty, and that that same reaction has held sway for that demographic for decades. The movie industry knows that the movie-going (and renting) audience is young. Young movie-goers haven’t had their fill yet of mindless entertainments, so they look forward to the next rehash of a genre. Because the movie business knows this, they produce mindless products aimed at that young audience, which invariably means there’s little or nothing for a more experienced viewer to appreciate. (Some of the recent animated features like Up are fighting back against this trend by not dumbing-down their stories, even as they willfully embrace sentimentality.)
“Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’re on the verge of a real renaissance in literature.”
You’re right that e-books are changing the landscape, and I see that as a good thing. It means that more space is available for content creators — although I don’t think the long tail theory works as a sales paradigm. (The new, freely-available means of distribution and publication do not equal sales.)
Where I think things evolve quickly, and in a positive direction, is in the literary space(s) that were never profitable to begin with. Art for art’s sake is now completely divorced not only from publishing’s largesse, but from other cultural gatekeepers, including the New York literatti and the university system. Quality and new voices have a chance to shine through in a way that they never have — albeit with even less of a chance of hitting it big. (A trade I’m willing to make on behalf of the planet.)
The literary world has always been small, and I think it will remain so when compared with mass-market genres and non-fiction categories. But that’s as it ever was in all mediums.