A Power Talk at the IndiaSocial Summit 2012, on the future of content.
Gautam K. John, then with the Akshara Foundation and an advisor to Inclusive Planet, giving his presentation at the Power Talks: Future of Content session, IndiaSocial Summit 2012.
Transcript
This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.
So I’m ostensibly talking about the future of content, but what I’m really going to do is trace an arc of content from historical times to present to see if anything has really changed. So when we first think about content, be it in the modern age or in the historical age, we think about books, something that we can touch, or music that we listen to, or video that we watch. And truthfully, the content age we imagine started with Gutenberg and the printed Bible.
What that allowed us to do was to actually produce accurate copies faster and most likely cheaper than ever before. So it was the Gutenberg press and the Gutenberg Bible that pretty much kicked off our entire content revolution, so to speak. But that is not to say that there has not been content before that.
Before Gutenberg, monks and monasteries hand-wrote books. And what’s interesting to note is that we lost something with the Gutenberg revolution. We lost the ability to make changes.
Whereas when monks wrote and copied out manuscripts and books, it wasn’t rote copying. What they did was introduce small little changes that kept stuff contemporary and changed with the times. And even before that, we had, in India, the guru-shishya system of learning and of storytelling, which allowed stories and content to morph with time to take on local flavor and context.
And in some way, when Gutenberg invented his printing press, we lost that entire subtlety that content had. Which begs the question, what does all of this content do? And content has historically and today been what I’d like to refer to as social objects.
They have catalyzed conversations. The coffee shops, the old coffee shops of London and of Europe were centers of conversation. This conversation always was catalyzed by objects of content, be it a talk, be it a newspaper, be it a book, be it a political philosophy.
Coffee shops have played a role in revolutions as well. I’d like to think that coffee shops were the original Twitter. They talk about content.
People voice unasked for opinions and they have fomented revolutions as well. And when you talk about content, the next thing that people consider is piracy. That’s the big, big, big thing.
And piracy isn’t new. I mean, as far back as 1557, the Queen of England gave the Stationers Company an exclusive monopoly to publish and copy content in the United Kingdom. They were the only people who could make copies.
And in 1603 was the first recorded use of the word pirate. People who made unauthorized copies of content were called pirates. Of course, this entire model of content is something that I would like to look at in a more structured way as what I call the content life cycle.
And as I see it, the content life cycle has four essential ingredients. One is the creation of content. And the creation can be multiple ways.
It can be, for example, with the Gutenberg Press, rote copying, or with manuscripts introducing small modifications. The distribution of content, be it through bookshops and centralized models, or even through peer models. The consumption of content, which, as we’d otherwise like to say, it means to watch a movie, read a book, or listen to music.
And the last one, which actually closes the loop, is the conversation around the content. And the truth be told, till like 20 years ago, those conversations were all horizontal, within groups of peers, but never really exploded on a global scale. And what made that possible was the internet, of course.
What the internet has primarily done is what, in terms of content, is three things. The first one is that geography is now history. I am as close to Manu, who lives close to my house, as I am to people in the US who live far away and I have never seen.
And what the internet has allowed us to do is A, break down geography as an issue, B, to accelerate the speed of conversation and to amplify it. In a sense, the velocity of discussion, so to speak. And the third most important thing from a content perspective is because the internet is all digital, it functions as one big copying machine.
Bits and bytes are far easier copied than physical objects. What did, you know, when you bring content and the digital era together, what are some of the things that could happen? For one, we no longer have printed Encyclopedia Britannica.
First published in 1768, 2010 was the last hardcover edition. And if I look at this through the lens of the content creation model that I posit, it’s interesting to see and examine why, perhaps, this is the last edition of the printed Britannica model. Britannica is produced in a very traditional hierarchical notion.
The content creation is done by experts. It’s done in a slow, methodical, analytical and quite truthfully, verifiable manner. It has then historically been distributed through one format, which is the 26 volumes of Britannica that grace our shelves, or the World Book, which was popular in India.
It’s only ever really used as a referential encyclopedia. No one ever says, I want to read Britannica today, and flips open a book of Britannica and continues reading it. Nobody ever says, what does someone think about Bangalore and open Encyclopedia Britannica anymore?
The third one is around the consumption, which is, as I said, something that is very, very specific and not really consumed widely. And the fourth one is the conversation loop. Very rarely do we have conversations about Encyclopedia Britannica.
50 years ago, sure, it was the de facto reference piece, but that’s no longer the case. And if you contrast this with what many people say caused the death and downfall of Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, you’ll see that that content cycle is completely different. The creation is not done by high priests of knowledge.
It is done by you and me. It is validated by you and me. The distribution is not via print, although you can buy Wikipedia in print.
It is done on, Wikipedia is available on as many devices as you own, and then a few. The consumption is fantastic. I mean, Wikipedia links are tweeted every day.
I am having an argument with Karthik about the nature of global warming. I will tweet him a link about Wikipedia, not about Encyclopedia Britannica. And the fourth one, which is really, really important, is the conversation loop.
Because what Wikipedia is built on is that conversation. Wikipedia’s content and that content has been built upon by the conversation that goes on, not just between people using Wikipedia, but people editing Wikipedia. Editors talk to each other.
Editors keep content current. And that, to me, is the huge charm of what the digital era allows. Of course, what I find charming, other people find terrifying.
And the truth of the matter is, I think as much as we have nostalgic memories of the old, I think that we’ve passed the inflection point where that can actually happen. And the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can build more innovative models. But something to keep in mind is that nostalgia will always have a premium.
There will always be a form, there will always be place for older models of content and older forms, but those will necessarily move to more premium models. Which, of course, is a good thing, because the amount of content that’s available to us is just enormous. And the challenge for content creators, really, is that the distinction between the amateur and the professional is blurred.
The amateur and the professional have access to the same tools, the same networks of distribution, and the same limited attention span that you and I have. So the question really is, if everyone’s producing content, if everyone has access to the same tools, what are some of the takeaways that content producers and businesses built on content can do? The first one I’d like to, the first one I’d like to think of is how we consume content today.
So this is an interesting comic someone called The Oatmeal put up recently, I don’t know if you saw it. He read this wonderful book called The Game of Thrones, and then he said, oh, there’s a TV series out because people on Twitter are talking about it, and he goes to watch it on Netflix. Of course, it’s not available.
Then he says, let me buy the DVD, and of course, as we all know in India, because we’re region six on the DVD, we get DVDs much later. So finally, he does what most of us would do, not me, of course, but most of y’all. He downloads the torrent, which is consuming content, but it’s just a possible loss of revenue for an organization, even though he’s tried really hard to make that possible.
The four broad trends I’d like to touch upon. The first one is I think the notion of control of content is over. The same thing that digital technologies make possible, they also make impossible.
We can no longer control content. DRM is dead. DVD region encoding is dead.
I’m happy that Flipkart agrees with me that DRM is dead, and the truth of the matter is that content now needs to be always available. There is no more artificial scarcity that we can introduce into the content ecosystem. You cannot say the US will watch it before me because I’m speaking to the people in the US every day, and I want to watch it when they are talking about it.
So your content has to be globally available and always available. You cannot close your store like IRCTC does between 10 p.m. at night and 5 a.m. in the morning. It’s not going to happen because the BitTorrent store is always open.
The third thing is accessibility, and I use accessibility in two ways. The first one is I want to buy content once and consume it everywhere. You as a content producer either need to make that possible or I will go out and make it possible.
I will rip my DVDs. I will download my eBooks because if I have the printed book, I don’t see it as morally ambiguous to do that. The flip side to the corollary to accessibility is something that I’d briefly like to touch upon about open standards.
I think we now have the technological ability to make things consumable everywhere because we are driving towards a world with open standards. I see I’m out of time, but I thought I had 15 minutes, so if you’ll bear with me for two more minutes. And the other rationale for accessibility and open standards is that we now have the chance to include everyone in the consumption of content, the visually impaired, the print impaired.
Technology makes this possible. We as content producers need to embrace open standards and make accessibility not just for those of us who want to access it on multiple devices, but for those of us who have never been able to access content historically otherwise. The second point on content is around the consumption of content.
We’ve traditionally looked at content consumption as something that’s very individual, very personal, to read a book, to listen to music, and to watch a movie alone. And these are things that we glorify, and that those will always exist. I don’t think those are going away.
But what we now have the ability to do is to transcend the consumption of content from an individual activity to a shared group experience, to actually consume content the way we live in groups. And what’s fantastic about that is that while the internet makes this possible, it also makes it possible, the vital spread of this content consumption, and also the word-of-mouth marketing, which is by far the most powerful way of marketing it. So to make your content consumption possible in groups and as an experience is also to make the vital spread through word-of-mouth marketing possible.
So, of course, this is fairly worrying, and I think every epochal shift is marked by people bemoaning the loss of business models and much use of law and technology to limit what is possible, and to also criminalize what we otherwise call sharing. But there’s something very interesting that I read recently. Nina Paley, I don’t know if you know her, she made this wonderful animated film called Sita Sings the Blues, and then not only did she make it available for free, she also made it available for people to remix and translate.
She was recently addressing a group of 17 and 18-year-old kids in the US, and her big concern was, do you guys always want to download everything and just use it for free? And their point was, no, we don’t want everything for free, we just want everything. And I think that’s a key takeaway for us to make.
I’ll briefly touch upon six broad takeaways that I had. One is to move from content to experiences because experiences are far more valuable. Content is based on an artificial scarcity, whereas experiences are authentic, real, and real.
That we need to move away from the content is king model and move to people are king model. Dina might have briefly touched upon insight yesterday, and I think the corollary to that is we now know more about what you and me like to watch and listen and hear and play with than ever before. And the content industry can no longer sit in its ivory tower and say, here is what you will listen to.
We have the ability to tailor and customize experiences. I think protection, the models of protection, be it law or technology, are fast dying, and we need to move from protection to sharing. That the solitary consumption of content will move to group and shared experiences.
And what’s tremendously powerful there is that you then have the ability to influence not only what other people will watch and hear and listen to, but also the kinds of content that are being created. That the content industry needs to move from being gatekeepers of content to being curators of content. And that top-down models of content creation will go the way of the dinosaur very soon, because A, we have the internet to distribute that, and B, the tools are available to everyone.
So the high priest model of content creation will very soon be challenged, as in the case of Britannica, by the community models of content creation. That’s about all I have time for. I don’t know if we’re taking questions now or later, but I’d just like to thank three people for insights into this presentation.
There’s Dina at the back, and Sumanth and Karthik who are on Twitter.
Originally published by indiasocial on 24 April 2012. View on YouTube →
Gautam John 
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