Un paio di settimane il MIT Comparative Media Studies e il Convergente Media Studies Consortium, hanno organizzato un’interessante conferenza dal titolo “futures of entertainment 2”.

Dopo l’edizione 2006, quella del 2007 sembra essere stata ancora più stimolante e visionaria. Non c’è dubbio che oggi l’intrattenimento stia diventando un driver molto importante nella definizione dei contenuti e delle relazioni di un brand, così come nel tipo di esperienza e di contenitore con cui si può costruire un’esperienza di comunicazione. A questo si aggiunge anche la stimolante teoria sviluppata dal professor Jenkins, della Convergente Culture, su cui ha scritto ovviamente anche un libro (qualcuno l’ha per caso letto?)

Ho trovato questa sintesi molto precisa e provocante delle cose principali emerse alla conferenza, molte conferme, alcuni spunti importanti di riflessione e su cui continuare a lavorare e magari anche a conversare assieme nelle prossime settimane. Ve la riporto per intero, x’ credo che sintesi migliore non si possa fare. L’autore è Faris Yakob, planner e strategist in Naked, centro media internazionale di nuova generazione con sede a Londra. A voi:

Naked London's Faris Yakob reports from the recent Futures of Entertainment conference, held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alan Kay, one of the fathers of modern computing, once said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. I imagine he would have been very comfortable at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Conference, where most of the panellists could quite comfortably claim to be inventing the future of entertainment.

Masterminded by media genius, professor of comparative media studies Henry Jenkins, MIT assembled some of the great and geeky to discuss their vision for how Convergence Culture will change the nature of entertainment.

FOE2 firstly gave us an insight into the future of conferences. No presentations, no case studies, no sale pitches – just 2-3 hours panel discussions. More like a class at MIT than an advertising conference, EVERYONE was tap tap tapping away on their laptops while the discussions went on. An official backchannel was set up and questions from the audience were dynamically offered to the panel. From monologue to dialogue.

Jenkins kicked things off with an overview of some of the stuff that has caught their eye in the last year. As Henry pointed out later, when he wrote Convergence Culture there was no Second Life, no Facebook – so the landscape has already changed radically.



Covering Contagious favourites like the Halo 3 launch, he also touched upon things like IBM’s Many Eyes visualisation project, A-List vidder Luminosity’s work , including the amazing 300/Vogue remix, new network run ad funded free tv portal Hulu, and Souljah Boy – who used the remix culture to propel himself to the top of the billboard charts.

The first panel was mobile – long hailed as the device of convergence as it pulls together both device functionality and provides a bridge between the web and the world. Marc Davis, social media guru at Yahoo! Research Labs, spoke about the potential of devices that were both spatially and temporally aware, and then showed us what he meant – with the Tagmaps project.

Mobile is the future of the web: 'I’m looking to a time where the Yahoo! Network of 500million users becomes 4billion users, mostly on mobile phones.'

'Advertising gets better the more you know about what people want' and that it needed to move away from interruption, towards becoming a gift, something that can be passed around your social graph. The best platform to understand people’s intentions is the mobile – which is why it will become the ad platform of the future.

Speaking of which, the advertising panel, featuring Baba Shetty from Hill Holiday, Mike Rubenstien from The Barbarian Group, covered familiar ground for readers of Contagious about the re-balancing of the value equation between brands and people, delivering value alongside sales messages, via utility or entertainment. I was trying to move the UGC conversation on to user modulated content.

The final panel gave some insight into how the creators of entertainment see their relationship with brands and how the future is unfolding.

Jesse Alexander, producer and writer on Heroes, spoke about how brand integration wasn’t a problem as long as the brands creatively engaged with the show: 'As long as you let me do it organically in a way that works and helps me tell a story. Get me in the room with the advertisers and let me engage with them creatively.'

And Jeff Gomez, a creator of worlds who, with his company Starlight Runner, is currently working with Coca-Cola and W&K on crafting the world around the Happiness Factory, left us with his vision of the future of entertainment:

'When I was a dungeon master and I was playing with people around the table I was creating a world, a universe, and there was a spark of magic – we were in this world and I as a storyteller was validating and celebrating your participation in this world and raising you up and then challenging you and then celebrating you when you overcame the challenge.

I want you to be validated and celebrated for helping to construct the canon.

You will eventually become a character in narrative world and, depending on the level of participation, your cleverness, your reputation you will move closer and closer to the centre of the action.'