I couldn't remember what Media Futures Conference 08 reminded me of, until a few weeks after the event. Media Futures Conference 08 asked us to "bring some users into the room", to provoke some discussion as part of the conference morning track.
Of course we agreed, it would be a pleasure! To explore the different forms within which people can engage with each other, and with ideas, is part of the whole Plot experience, and there are lots of ways to do it.
However, from our perspective, the idea of a direct, live interrogation on stage didn't appeal - we felt it was too out of the context of everyday life, and perhaps too much of a spectacle for people to feel comfortable sharing their real perspectives. And from an audience point of view, well, we were a bit bemused when attending a recent innovation conference to find the best and only means of participating was to sit next to each other using twitter...
Eventually we came up with 2 experiments, named unsurprisingly, Plan A and B.
Plan A
We asked conference attendees a week before the conference, if they would join in on an experiment in "distributed user-research".
We wanted to see if, collectively, we could bring in a whole bunch of research material "one-click" away from the conference audience. Before the conference, find one person, and capture their responses to three open-ended questions - the idea being that each attendee provide one voice, resulting in "mass interview'.
This would make it more in-depth than a simple survey, but less intrusive than a full-on ethnographic observation. We would collate whatever happened and see what shapes the material suggested. No real truth claims. No careful statistically valid sampling. No big deal. For inspiration only, and to the participants who bothered to join in.
What did we get? Just the one response from Paula Goes, who generously went the whole hog and sent us some video, and a transcript. Thank you Paula!
Plan B
We had a back-up plan of some five very raw interviews â the same three questions as in Plan A - with a fairly even age spread from 20 to 80 years old.
The experiment here would be to get the audience at the conference to collectively "play the ethnographer" - to listen for patterns in the material; to think through what was being said; to think about what it made them think about; to muse on what secondary questions they might have wanted to ask them. Nice and slow.
No such luck.
An audience member asked why didn't we get a more reflective group of respondents? Fair enough â they were all white, mostly middle class. Straight observation, but not about what they were saying.
Next up "What conclusions have you come to?" We had none to offer. (In this context we were presenting the opportunity to listen "in the raw", not presenting a study or packaging insights for a report.)
That's not good enough...
Plot: "Er... That's not the point of this session..."
So, in sum, we got more comments about our process and "lack-of-professional-opinions" than evidence of what the audience were thinking then and there about what they had heard...No one mentioned the points of view, the inherent contradictions people make in what they say, and what they say about what they do but you have to slow down to listen, so we invited people to do just that.
It takes a slow pace to get there.
eliotf got the idea beautifully - phew!
wonder if the aim of this is just to get a room of execs who are used to consuming reports, to just _listen_ to users?
Exactly!
Standing at the back was an observation in itself - many were hunched, finishing their presentations for the afternoon, some Twittering, some messaging others out of the room. Talk about continuous partial attention! No wonder we get misheard.
For example for those who could not see the screen, we described the picture of a traditional idea of 'user' which was an addict. This then gets translated us accusing the twitterers as addicts. Hmmm. No. Didn't. Not an opinion I hold actually.
Here's what you could have won
Sadly we can't talk about the user research we've done for media and other companies as they rightly get us to sign all sorts of non disclosing agreements. We can't talk about all of the propositions we've developed from research, the research we've analysed into specific patterns and reccomendations for services and strategies even. We deliberately didn't do the thing about how we feel about the future of media, or spending 45 minutes on how great we are.
We could go on for ages about the nature of how people see things differently, how the expansion of sources of media content, the assumptions of different ages around challenging what's seen as illegal and what's just normal to them. We could talk about how the increasing noise of broadcast and messaging that goes on around us is likely to be worse with the increase in pervasive media, and how people will find ways of switching off. And how 360 degree projects need to understand the user to make sure the risks are managed, and projects are staged to make sure the story and proposition of the media service remains compelling as it develops. There's a lot out there now, and what's amazing is to see how people develop distancing strategies to keep themselves out of the gaze of the always on media.
We just did an experiment that didn't work! And we didn't get to hear anything from those in the audience who had some thoughts about what they had heard. Just the critics who like to absorb the available time.
And it reminded me of the time I *died* on stage doing a solo stand-up routine in Manchester in 1982, at the Gallery, Peter Street. It's a painful memory of being crowd-mauled by a group of livid radical feminists, who having misunderstood a half-delivered joke, heckled like crazy, and made me lose my thread, and forget the name of the band I was supposed to be announcing. But I'm sure they felt all the better for it! At Media Futures there was a similar group of opinion-fixed hecklers here who totally missed the point.
You can experiment in public, but you have to take the rough with the smooth. Very glad to put cats amongst pidgeons, happy to stir up the journos who didn't get it, and the academics who thought we were presenting a study - not listening to what we said we were asked and intending to do!
Hope it doesn't stop other people out there experimenting with formats. It's still worth it, even if people don't want to join in!
So what's our pov on the interviews?
Well, the youngest disliked the celebritisation of the media, and how subjects he was interested in, like food, were mediated through celebrity rather than the subject itself. As if the people got in the way of what he wanted to see.
One said there was not much out there aimed at her, and many said variations on the same. Most felt themselves as 'mainstream' consumers of media, and some unplugged completely. They rapidly filter out what is not for them, though they feel free to listen and watch what they want if it appeals enough.
Some get tired of things quickly. One had a fear of getting hooked to soaps that required regular commitment. Others use traditional forms in their own ways - hopping from channels to keep interest. Some liked to be surprised. More confirmations of changing patterns of consumption, and an interesting reluctance to commit to too much regular programming.
In terms of what people would take with them, some went for favourites, others went for media they could express themselves with, others wished for a continuing media pipeline from the BBC as a whole (IPlayer everywhere, I guess).
There are many themes are going on here. What's interesting is that there is no particular space for new types of media to fill (as in watching Eastenders at the bus stop), as everyone had little time, so it's more a matter of making what there is better and more precisely appealing. There are far more means to get content to people, but they expect now to be active in their consumption - from what they choose and when, to how some expect to author and broadcast their media. (More later, please nag if interested).
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