It’s not about online and offline: it’s about blended reality

alan moore – smlxl january 2010

My son Josef wakes up in the morning, goes downstairs and turns on the television. He might watch Cebeebies, or he might have a go on his Xbox 360. Then his mate Tom calls on the house phone, they are both playing the same MMORPG. Much to my frustration, Josef turns on the speakerphone and I can hear the conversation throughout the house. Like me, my son has a big, loud voice.

Then the doorbell goes. More of Josef ’s mates arrive, they decide to play Call of Duty, Modern Warfare and - of course - there is a big group discussion around the multiplayer game; strategy and tactics. The BIG CONVERSATION starts to do my head in, and the sun is shining – I “suggest” they go and play a game of “it” in our back garden. (BTW – Black Hawk Down is “in”)

I look out the window and see they are climbing up

trees and all over the pergola – and diving

through the laurel hedge. The little buggers! I had to cut the major branches off

three trees last week because of their exploits. I run into the garden, and

I am having aahem, A SHIT FIT!!!!!

Sulking they go off to the skate park…

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Later that day I call Josef on his

mobile, asking him to come home; he moans and groans but eventually he arrives with cuts and bruises. He

stacked it over the spine, apparently. He watches some Simpsons on TV

and we might play a game of

basketball then he moves onto his

computer to watch some more

YouTube clips.

Before bedtime, being a cuddly kind of guy, he gives me a big cuddle, which

I always enjoy.http://www.flickr.com/photos/94104313@N00/3058537867

But why is this story relevant?

Because Josef ’s world is not one defined by an artificial sense of separation between real and virtual. According to William Gibson, author, Sci-Fi writer and inventor of the word ‘cyberspace’, there is no online or offline - there is only blended reality. “One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real,” he says.

nedra and her avatar sheeva weeks

“In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that, which isn’t cyberspace, is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here.”

When I was a child, I lived in a linear, disconnected media world of scarcity not of abundance. All media was structured, inflexible, defined by production and distribution processes; books were books, TV was TV, cinema was cinema.

And my days as a teenager were spent worrying whether to go out or not just in case I missed a phone call from Beatrix, the one that made my heart soar – love left unrequited through our inability to connect.

The nearest we got to any form of blended reality was the taking of, say, Ian Fleming’s books and turning them into films. I remember coming home with my father one evening after seeing a James Bond film, demanding that he drive home like James Bond, and was crestfallen when he said that only happened in films.

Whereas in Josef ’s networked world it is when there is no connectivity that he struggles. It is when he cannot simultaneously toggle between the arterial life-giving connection to information, content and experience, some of which he co-creates, that he becomes frustrated:

“Who turned the internet off ?” he booms, or, “I’ve run out of credit,” or, “No one wants to play with me!”

Having been fascinated by communication, culture, technology and media for the best part of a decade, partly by watching my three children adroitly navigate life through the virtual and the real as an everyday occurrence, Gibson’s observation seems obvious.

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Josef, born into in a world of connectivity and media abundance, would as a young child do the following. He would get me to bring down his box of dinosaurs and put them in the lounge. Then he would ask me to play the video Jurassic Park. After sitting with me for about ten minutes, Josef would get his dinosaurs out, and Jurassic Park became the contextual, audio and emotional backdrop to his play. This went on for hours. Then other characters were introduced, monsters from a Japanese TV programme, a medieval castle, modern day fighter planes, and a superhero toy that we bought for a dollar in a car boot sale in Oxnard, California – to which he seemed strangely attached. I would watch him, fascinated by this intense form of blended reality recreation. Josef instinctively knew how to bring different media together to enhance and augment his play.

So we have multiple experiences in reality and virtuality; we will combine

these two realms to augment and enhance our experiences.

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So perhaps the first port of call is the

word ‘digital.’ The idea that digital is

‘different’ to analogue is

important, as it creates a mental

model on which we frame the world. As

Russell Davies posted on his blog, Meet the New Schtick, “there are a lot of

people around now who have

thoroughly integrated

‘digitalness’ into their lives. To the

extent that it makes as much sense to

define them as digital as it does to define them as air breathing, i.e. it's true but not useful

or interesting.” Amen to that.

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In this blended reality we can also live two different

but converged lives. We can connect locally - close

physical bonds are experiences that we

as humans so desperately need and yet we can also

find fulfilment in co-creating further

experiences across time and space via digital

technologies. As I write this I am sitting in the

Cambridge University Library; I will go to get

some lunch from the market square, but I am

also connecting and collaborating with people as

far away as Japan, the USA, and Finland. People read my blog from all over the world and yet when I get home to

my village just outside of Cambridge, I will kiss my

wife, hug my son and water the vegetables. If I had to choose between either of

these two life stories it would be half a life.

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This to me is where the networked society comes into its own - the ability to converge very different types of networks enhances the human condition and the human experience. It’s neither one nor the other. Personally the word ‘digital’ frustrates me, it suggests ‘machines that are not part our DNA’. As a consequence many think ‘digital’ strips us of our very souls, or that digital is not of us, and that digital does not live in our analog world. Therefore digital becomes but another straight-line component, another silo in the silos of corporate culture and consumer life.

Then another thought struck me whilst reading Kevin Kelly’s book, Out of Control: the new biology of machines. I realised that we are plugging our analog world into the networked world. We are marrying engineering with evolution, adapting linear systems into something more complex yet at the same time repurposing them, reprogramming them to perform in new, simplified ways. In the same way that my son intuitively adapted his physical and virtual resources into blended play, Ben Terrett, a friend of Russell Davies, did the same thing – though not with dinosaurs and Jurassic Park. Ben, Tom Taylor and Russell decided to take stuff from the internet and print it in a newspaper format after a bit of research showed them that humongous newspaper printing presses would run limited editions of 1,000 copies.

This is what is perplexing in terms of communication, marketing and business; to say you are a digital agency, or a social media agency, or, to divide up an organisation in terms of its communications into silos; digital, mobile, social media et al, means you are only part of the solution. Such a linear approach to communication to drive commercial success, thin-sliced specialisms, hide-bound with siloed profit centers, means that there is no way that an organisation can develop coherently relevant communication strategies and execute them. Organisations who are not able to develop people focused blended reality solutions misunderstand the context of the world they live in.

In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins explores the idea and concept of Transmedia Storytelling through The Matrix. He explains, “A transmedia story unfolds across multiple platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the idea form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced into a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction.”

The consequence of such transmedia storytelling is the creation of deeper context, and a more sustained form of emotional and intellectual engagement that translates into commercial success. What the Wachowski brothers recognised was that we experience the world as a blended reality, and that blended reality also embraces a more, participatory ‘read write’ culture.

Would not such insight inspire brands and businesses to understand how to truly engage their customers, audiences, stakeholders? The Matrix is a film, a comic and an online game; dare I say a great brand? And what do great brands do? They tell great stories, and they deliver great customer experience and engagement. Companies on one level compete so aggressively, and must by law maximise shareholder value, but are also hamstrung, unable to truly innovate. Consequently they hurt themselves financially. The buzz word of social media now becomes another silo of the marketing silo bucket and the cycle continues; will next year’s buzzword augmented reality become another silo?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/14561328@N05/1512273445

The imperative for any company interested in the

power of communication is to get to grips with some of

these defining issues of our time, and I would propose

that being able to be a literate and able navigator of our

networked and participatory culture is the means by which we adapt to not only survive

but thrive in this mass media fragmented networked

society, rather than rushing into and thrashing around in

“social media marketing” then making it another silo.

And why is that?

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As the economist Herbert Simon explains,

“What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention... The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.” 

Markets are conversations, argued Doc Searls, and thriving markets are (1) based on trust, (2) defined by the fact that we are all traders and participants, all engaged; intellectually, commercially and emotionally.

The opportunities of the networked society promise much, but we must seek a wider lens with which to see, and understand the issues highlighted. Organisations must learn to blend their thinking and

execution, and not see whatever it is they do see described as “social media” as just another add-on.

The gift with a price

Wassily Kandinsky said that “every work of art is a child of its time”, and so we must understand that the child of our time is a revolution in which humanity is renegotiating the power relationships that define: our relationship to each other, how we make meaning, how we make culture, who makes that culture and who should profit from it. It also just so happens that the tools and the weapons of this revolution are communication tools. There is no going back to the way things used to be, no matter how hard some try to air-brush reality from – well reality.

So, as we de-couple from the ‘Straight Lines’ of our

industrialised world – which framed all aspects of our lives – we do need a new

logic to understand this new one. It must be a logic which

provides a framework for how we relate to each other, how we communicate, how we create more effective and

flexible organisations and how we create wealth.

  Because we are still faced with the same challenges:

how do we find our customers, how do we make

our customers sticky, how can we increase trade with our customers and serve

those customers whilst at the same time, reducing the cost

to serve? And finally how to just get stuff done.

My world was a linear, disconnected world of media

and communication, whereas Josef only knows a networked world of blended

reality. He would not understand the concept of

the phone box,

because he has a phone in his pocket. If he were able to see me racing across the road

when I was at college to get to the phone box ringing in the street, he would think

that rather strange.

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In the networked society

the idea of networked economics is different

to mass media economics – and as Henry Jenkins says, we are in a period of

transition from a world of analog

economics to a world defined by what we call blended reality. There is no offline

and online, digital vs. analog;

there is only blended reality.

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And this picture? It is from the epic Finnish

song cycle called the Kalevala. Every Finn knows

this story, and it was created from many Finnish folk stories that came from

every part of Finland, blended into one

extraordinary story. This is the age of engagement,

where through storytelling across media platforms we

create deeper context, deeper context creates

greater meaning, which correlates with the economics of attention and how brands,

business and anyone else with a need to communicate to an

audience of whatever persuasion can survive and

thrive in the networked society.

Footnote The Matrix was first released on 31 March 1999

It earned $171 million in North America and over £250 million in the UK and $463 million

worldwide, and later became the first DVD to sell more than three million copies in the U.S.

How we can help you? we offer is a series of interventions* that enables the following:

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[1] By fully understanding the logic of the networked society, and how this fundamentally changes the way business models will succeed, you will be better equipped to drive business success.

[2] By opening up minds, collectively, to the potential of this new market-place, the No Straight Lines methodology will help you determine the communication initiatives appropriate to your company.

[3] By absorbing and understanding the most important ideas that emerge from the programme you will be able to initiate an action plan for you and your company which we can help facilitate.

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*For more information please contact:   Alan Moore Ping 1: alanm@smlxtralarge.com Ping 2: +44 7768 364 538   Euan Semple Ping 1: euan.semple@gmail.com Ping 2: +44 7515 355 362

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