I feel like the Knights of Ni sometimes. I get to hearing certain words, and they just make me crazy. It isn’t really the word itself that ticks me off, it is usually that it is used in a particularly inane (and usually increasingly popular fashion). This new rant is with the same word that I’ve bitched about before: conversation.
Over at boingboing, Cory Doctorow reported that Disney had apparently begun to consider piracy to be a serious competitor for their customers. The article he cites quotes Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney and her attempt to describe Disney’s approach in trying to exploit a market that could (at least potentially) be described as primarily the realm of pirates. Her primary point is that Disney is interested in creating content, because “content drives everything else”. It’s marketing-speak, but as marketing-speak goes, it’s not bad marketing-speak. The basic idea is that if Disney continues to create compelling interesting content, people will pay for it.
None of this really bugs me, but this is what Cory Doctorow had to say:
Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
I’m sure Cory thought that was clever, and indeed, it might be except for one simple, rather obvious fact:
Conversation requires two things: someone to talk to, and something to talk about. Of these two things, Disney can only manufacture one. Because it can’t manufacture the other, acting as if it is some particular failing for them not to provide it for you seems rather silly. Conversations aren’t (barring the possible exception of 976 phone sex lines) products. Acting as if it were the responsibility (or even the capability) of companies to supply them is just silly.
[tags]Conversation,Boing Boing,Cory Doctorow,Rants and Raves[/tags]
Addendum: If conversation is so important as Cory claims, then why does boingboing not allow comments?
I didn’t see anything in Cory’s article that made me think he thought Disney was supposed to manufacture conversation; it seemed clear to me that he also thought Disney could only manufacture content, but that conversation, which Disney can’t manufacture or control, is more socially important.
Of course companies can’t manufacture conversation, but they’re in a position to expedite it.
Game companies, for instance, do just this not simply by hosting forums etc. but also by employing full time “Community Managers”. Critically, having such people in place also allows them to see exactly what’s happening around their products.
I disagree with both of you. Clearly Cory is criticizing Disney’s dedication to creating content, so presumably he thinks that they can do something more important. He thinks that conversations are more important. But as I said, conversations aren’t a product. They can’t be manufactured and sold. Therefore, it makes very little sense to pretend that Disney (or any company) would be better off trying to create them.
Additionally, while some companies can expedite conversations (say, networking or phone companies) by providing the essential technology, I think it is a solid step backwards to think that the content of our conversations should be effected to any degree by companies. Let’s take the gaming company example: if you think that a particular video game sucks (and let’s assume for a second it is) then how is having someone hired by the company as the expediter of conversation going to help you at all?
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