“American Idol” was a critical part of my middle school life. People would talk about the contestant performances, funny reactions from the judges, and everything in between. But towards the end of the season, one topic consistently came up.
Who did you vote for?
Voting became its own type of tribalism. It forced ownership in a choice made and grouped you because of it. You felt compelled to defend yourself because of the decision you made, and every week people would gather around to watch the results. It was a phenomenon, and I didn’t even like music or singing. But what made American Idol so compelling to watch? A big part of it was the audience participation via text voting. It made you feel like a part of the show, and it gave you a stake in the outcome.
Content continues to play a more important role in our life, but one thing that has not really changed is the relationships between the content and the viewer. Content still happens through passive consumption — you sit there and watch. I anticipate that new forms of content start becoming more than that, and we’ll see many successes come from getting audience participation enabled by tech tools.
Example 1: The Hive Mind
I had a “holy shit” moment in 2014. I was in my college dorm room and I was typing manically into a chat box. I was trying so hard to get the player to go to the left in the Team Rocket hideout.
In February 2014, the social experiment known as “Twitch Plays Pokemon” came out. It was an experiment, where someone connected a gameboy emulator to a chat box, and decisions were automatically made based on what everyone in the chat was saying to do.
As you can imagine, it was absolute chaos. But it was the kind of chaos that you couldn’t stop watching, and even contributed to the madness.
A small part of me felt that same American Idol ownership. I felt like I was contributing to the content itself, and got increasingly more hooked. And it was also the first time I got to see what collective intelligence looked like in real-time: it was almost like watching a living organism. This was a hive mind.
Arjun Sethi and Andy Artz wrote a fantastic piece about Hive Minds, especially this takeaway:
Because of the increased frequency of interactions, a hive behaves more intelligently, and because of the decreased friction between nodes, a hive can do more than transfer data. It responds and evolves based on that data. The hive isn’t just more networked. It’s more densely populated with organic, living components.
A more recent example of this hive mind was on r/place. It started with a blank canvas where you could color 1 pixel every 5 minutes. The hive mind descended, and what was created was mesmerizing.
I kept checking this just to see how it changed every few hours, and it was insane. Even looking now at the German flag stretching, the Mona Lisa recreated, and the goddamn windows 95 toolbar makes you appreciate how creative people are and the magic that happens when you tap the hive mind. The subreddit description put it better than I ever could.
There is an empty canvas.
You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another.
Individually you can create something.
Together you can create something more.
Example 2: The New Reality Show
Go check out Martin Shkreli’s YouTube/Twitch channels. I don’t know why, but I find them fascinating. It’s an eclectic mix of him rambling about everything from pharma, video games, etc., but the really interesting parts are when he has back-and-forths with people in the chat logs. It’s seeing how he actually reacts and responds, in real-time, to people calling him a sociopath and worse. People are flooding these chat boxes hoping he’ll respond to them.
In fact, if you read any “How To Be A Good Livestreamer” guides online, the #1 or #2 rule for almost all of them is “Engage With Your Audience”.
The chat + video combo really enables this new type of interaction, which viewers prize and people are making some serious money from. Like $100K+ a year kind of money. And even YouTube is trying to get a better piece of it and recognizes the desire that watchers have to be acknowledged by their streamer. They released Super Chat, paying to get your message colored and pinned to the top of a chat during a live stream, and say it’s “like paying for that front-row seat in the digital age”.All of this basically leads to the new reality show, where viewers are constantly watching someone else’s life but creating a two-way relationship where they interact with the viewers as well. Some ways this probably evolves/is happening already:
Reactions — People love reaction videos, and seeing it happen live makes it seem more authentic.
Life choices — Justin.tv was predecessor to Twitch, and was basically just him livestreaming his life. I imagine people doing this and then giving the audience some say in the choices they make as they come to forks in their life. This actually sounds kind of similar to the man who sold shares in himself.
AMAs — AMAs (Ask Me Anything) are great ways for people to ask insightful questions and get answers from people they may not ever have had access to. One thing that’s tough about AMAs is that typing makes it hard to respond to a significant number, while speaking and videoing can actually be done faster. Whale seems to be trying something along these lines.
News — Instead of live news just broadcasting straight to an audience, reporters can actually be on the site of a live news event and see what their audience wants to know more about, which could guide them in their actual reporting.
Example 3: Choose Your Own Path
Did any of you read those “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories as a kid (or an adult if you roll like that)? I would read and re-read them so many times just to try out different paths in the story and see where they end up.
You were an active participant in the story. The books are even written in the second person to make you feel included, and the multiple pathways you can take in the decision tree made the content very repeatable.
Choice making to progress a story is inherent to video games, but the line between passive content (TV) and active content (video games) is starting to blur. “Interactive fiction” is a storytelling/gaming style that’s been around for ages, and even some of the more recent critically-acclaimed video games are praised because of their complex decision trees, various endings, and replay value (examples: Mass Effect, Heavy Rain, etc.)
While I think this style provides a lot of replay value, the two issues are that
- It’s not social compared to the other two examples. You make these decisions in isolation as you’re watching the content so it’s still a 1-on-1 relationship with the content.
- It requires the most work to create since multiple different decisions paths yield exponentially more work. It would be interesting if this somehow got automatically generated as you made decisions, but not sure how that would work (*cough*AI probably*cough*).
Even Netflix now is going down this route, creating content with multiple narratives and endings that viewers can choose. Considering how good Netflix is becoming at content, this will be a good case study for the format.
These are some of the ways I think tech is allowing us to interact with our content. And this wouldn’t be a medium post if I didn’t coin a term, so I’m going with the “American Idol Effect”. Copyright coming (not really).
If you have any thoughts feel free to comment or reach out on twitter @nikillinit.