Two screen synergy, Twitter and TV - a load of old claptrap
The future of television is a load of old claptrap. And, in the context of the Quantum Television model, I mean that in a good way. During the discussions of dual-screen / 2-screen viewing at the #2screen event held by Mint Digital, there were several ideas arising for programme makers facing the modern living room containing several sources of visual entertainment and communication opportunities:
Margaret Robertson pointed out from the 2screen stage that the X Factor already appeared to operate intuitively in this manner, being so repetitive and laboured in its approach to releasing its quanta of interest, that people had ample opportunity to tweet or Facebook their mates about the wonderful-cum-dreadful spectacle, without risk of missing a single significant moment.
But the laughter track... It's timed, it's artful. This Twitter and dual screen gaming stuff is a conflicting input. And you can't seriously expect us [content producers] to fill our work with dips to allow people to do other stuff? This is an artless idiocy! A modern fad! Claptrap! But it's far from modern. Indeed it stretches back centuries to classical music and theatre. The very term 'claptrap' originally refers to a point in a musical piece where the composer has left space to breathe - space to applaud after a particularly rousing section has hit crescendo - the music continues, but it's maybe not the composers finest four bars... Clap trap later came to refer to a manipulative moment in drama designed to garner applause. Now Claptrap's come to mean nonsense and bunkum - filler - which is likely the way many fans of the Classical Television Model would still dismiss the back channels of Twitter. But the word's origins betray a higher art to the timing, to an awareness of audience alive and active in an experience. Give it a name... The clap trap, the laughter track, the space to exhale after a seemingly impossible period of tension in a movie... to look across at a friend and blow air from puffed cheeks in expressed relief and say "Bloody hell!". These are things we've always known and always appreciated in the rhythms of narrative. Just because the opportunities to share thoughts and emotions while watching have increased doesn't mean the desire to do so is new. Behaviour = motivation + opportunity (Clay Shirky's equation, not mine). We're not building our own pyres here, people. We're stoking the fire in the hearth of community. How content producers choose to react and engage with this new opportunity is vital. It mustn't be crass or cynical - that's how this really does all turn to shit. Evolved and relevant productions must be intelligent, engaged and, above all, respectful of the audience. The rewards are entirely exciting, if a little unknown; the stolid alternatives, while safe today, represent an inexorable senescence from relevance in the quantum television age.
- The need for programme-makers to evolve their craft to accommodate (what Matt Locke called) ‘tiny, asynchronous social actions’ that occurred because of their content;
- To be more aware and prepared for - as Kevin Slavin suggests - the bits of interest that break off from the main body of a show and gain their own gravity, carrying something away with them and gathering their own particles and energy (user generated quanta). I'm thinking the laughable choice of 'Synergy' as team name in the first episode of the latest series of The Apprentice - which received 760 mentions among 1000s of Tweets across the programme's TX hour (see Roo Reynolds' excellent post on the hashtag activity around Ep1 of The Apprentice. Disclosure: I work with Roo in BBC Vision.)
Margaret Robertson pointed out from the 2screen stage that the X Factor already appeared to operate intuitively in this manner, being so repetitive and laboured in its approach to releasing its quanta of interest, that people had ample opportunity to tweet or Facebook their mates about the wonderful-cum-dreadful spectacle, without risk of missing a single significant moment.
Watch Margaret's description of her XFactor epiphany - which kicks in around 7mins 15secs into the embedded video below:
Indeed, the X Factor seems to know itself and its audience well. Monterosa (dual screen masters of the Million Pound Prize Drop) have created a social interface specifically to capture the tiny, asynchronous social actions around the show's madness. The show knows people aren't watching it all in one continuously consumed block of seamless energy - the X Factor plays to the quantum television model, and does so brilliantly. Channel 4's Seven Days the same; Strictly Come Dancing too; and over a year before, The Apprentice predictor game keyed into that desire to play with the content - to engage and dissect, to mock and place bets - to treat their experience of television as an activity rather than a passive absorbtion. And those most innovative and exciting and alive programmes today are playing to the staccato rhythms of the frantic exchange of quanta between TV and active audience. 
(@BBCApprentice encourages the 2-Screen audience. Hardly super-spanky, innovative stuff, but an editorial recognition and response to the quanta of content in a show and the energy/attention that leaves the main body of content to follow it.) But this is surely horrible, no? The idea that you might need to manufacture some hideous pause in a programme to make room for this Twitter twaddle, this phatic nonsense, this claptrap? This is surely a modern malaise of excess communication that will bring ruin to the decades-old craft of television narrative? Hardly. And it's hardly new. As Kevin Slavin points out the television has, for decades, been playing us the laughter of dead people to make television work. What is canned laughter if not a desperate attempt to remove the utter loneliness and anomie that watching something absurd on television could evoke in a person? Slavin points us to the Friends without laughter clip ( apologies embedding's disabled on these clips), which he aptly describes as akin to Samuel Beckett's work. But also I'm reminded of Garfield Minus Garfield:
Imagine watching the Xfactor - all 250 minutes of it - alone. No tweets. No chat. No calls. Just you, Cowell and your conscience...
Slavin makes this point fantastically: that Twitter is now the room that you're in when you watch TV, and it's full of other people laughing, yelling, throwing drinks and sharing the funny. Think about how many sitcoms now are released without laughter tracks to punctuate and accentuate the comedy - to tell you it's ok to laugh, that you're not alone - more and more. And Slavin knows that - hence his development of Starling.TV to meet this need (a need he feels doesn't require 140 characters even to share a moment and achieve limbic resonance).
(@BBCApprentice encourages the 2-Screen audience. Hardly super-spanky, innovative stuff, but an editorial recognition and response to the quanta of content in a show and the energy/attention that leaves the main body of content to follow it.) But this is surely horrible, no? The idea that you might need to manufacture some hideous pause in a programme to make room for this Twitter twaddle, this phatic nonsense, this claptrap? This is surely a modern malaise of excess communication that will bring ruin to the decades-old craft of television narrative? Hardly. And it's hardly new. As Kevin Slavin points out the television has, for decades, been playing us the laughter of dead people to make television work. What is canned laughter if not a desperate attempt to remove the utter loneliness and anomie that watching something absurd on television could evoke in a person? Slavin points us to the Friends without laughter clip ( apologies embedding's disabled on these clips), which he aptly describes as akin to Samuel Beckett's work. But also I'm reminded of Garfield Minus Garfield:
But the laughter track... It's timed, it's artful. This Twitter and dual screen gaming stuff is a conflicting input. And you can't seriously expect us [content producers] to fill our work with dips to allow people to do other stuff? This is an artless idiocy! A modern fad! Claptrap! But it's far from modern. Indeed it stretches back centuries to classical music and theatre. The very term 'claptrap' originally refers to a point in a musical piece where the composer has left space to breathe - space to applaud after a particularly rousing section has hit crescendo - the music continues, but it's maybe not the composers finest four bars... Clap trap later came to refer to a manipulative moment in drama designed to garner applause. Now Claptrap's come to mean nonsense and bunkum - filler - which is likely the way many fans of the Classical Television Model would still dismiss the back channels of Twitter. But the word's origins betray a higher art to the timing, to an awareness of audience alive and active in an experience. Give it a name... The clap trap, the laughter track, the space to exhale after a seemingly impossible period of tension in a movie... to look across at a friend and blow air from puffed cheeks in expressed relief and say "Bloody hell!". These are things we've always known and always appreciated in the rhythms of narrative. Just because the opportunities to share thoughts and emotions while watching have increased doesn't mean the desire to do so is new. Behaviour = motivation + opportunity (Clay Shirky's equation, not mine). We're not building our own pyres here, people. We're stoking the fire in the hearth of community. How content producers choose to react and engage with this new opportunity is vital. It mustn't be crass or cynical - that's how this really does all turn to shit. Evolved and relevant productions must be intelligent, engaged and, above all, respectful of the audience. The rewards are entirely exciting, if a little unknown; the stolid alternatives, while safe today, represent an inexorable senescence from relevance in the quantum television age.
Keep th' faith,
Dan
PS - I urge you to watch all of the videos of the 2Screen presentations, available now from the Mint Digital 2Screen 2010 blog post.
