Martine Pagé

Mary Hodder of Napsterization is at the Blogs and Social Software Conference in Paris and she’s getting boooored. I have had the same problem at various panels that I have attended in the last few years. Seems like no matter how interesting the people around the table are, panels often end up going nowhere and one leaves the conference without any new knowledge or insight. There is always a person who talks for too long and the most interesting part, the interaction with the audience, runs out of time after a few minutes.

In her post, Mary Hodder makes a few propositions for a new form of conference. This echoes something that we had talked about for the Montreal Blog Conference. If the conference ever does come together (which is unlikely to happen in 2005), we will have to make sure to veer away from the traditional panel form.

If you are curious about the conference in Paris, visit Vancouver blogger Darren Barefoot who is also attending. His feedback is interesting because Darren has just organized a blogging conference which took place in Vancouver last February.

Maybe we just don’t need another blogging conference in Montreal… Still, the original idea did not come from a « need » but from a « desire ». I look at the long list of people who were interested and I’m thinking, wow, it would still be fun to get everybody together to talk.

Maybe we should forget about traditional organization. Perhaps all we need is to find a big room (or a bunch of small rooms), pick a few subjects and give people a date and a time. Then we just let things happen – with the help of a few « activators » (vs moderators) – and see what comes out of it. If it turns into complete chaos, we could just open a few beers and claim that all we ever wanted was another party anyway.

« For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the »masses » want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that »24 » episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of »24, » you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like »24, » you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion — video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms — turn out to be nutritional after all. […]

Of course, the entertainment industry isn’t increasing the cognitive complexity of its products for charitable reasons. The Sleeper Curve exists because there’s money to be made by making culture smarter. The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there’s a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like »Lost » or »Alias » is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars. Finally, interactive games have trained a new generation of media consumers to probe complex environments and to think on their feet, and that gamer audience has now come to expect the same challenges from their television shows. In the end, the Sleeper Curve tells us something about the human mind. It may be drawn toward the sensational where content is concerned — sex does sell, after all. But the mind also likes to be challenged; there’s real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system. »

A New York Times Magazine article by author (and blogger) Steven Johnson about how watching tv can make you smarter. His most recent book, Everything bad is good for you, How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, is coming out on May 5th.

Found via Complications Ensue.

« Un sondage L�ger marketing, publi� en octobre 2004, r�v�le que les Qu�b�cois sont les lecteurs les plus apathiques au pays.

Cela confirme des chiffres publi�s il y a quelques ann�es par le minist�re de la Culture et des communications, selon lesquels 52 % de la population qu�b�coise de plus de 15 ans, affirme lire r�guli�rement 7,3 heures par semaine en moyenne. Presque deux heures de moins que la moyenne canadienne.

Le Qu�bec se d�marque toutefois au niveau de la lecture d’un journal quotidien. Alors que les ventes s’essoufflent ailleurs au pays, la tendance se maintient en effet depuis cinq ans ici. En 2003, environ 6 766 000 exemplaires de quotidiens anglophones et francophones se sont vendus chaque semaine au Qu�bec.

Entre 1998 et 2003, le Qu�bec fut la seule province � enregistrer une hausse de tirage pour ses quotidiens, avec 1,7 %. Ailleurs au pays, les provinces ont essuy� des baisses d’en moyenne 7,5 %. »

Article tir� du cahier sp�cial sur l’ouverture de la Grande Biblioth�que � Montr�al, dans La Presse du samedi 23 avril.