Hollywood's new Geek Elite

Can I call them or what? A mere week and a half after I lay out the need for the church to take a serious look at Geek culture, the latest Fast Company arrives, and within is an article on "The Rebel Alliance" .... Hollywood's new geek elite.

These are the creators of all the sci-fi hits that are taking the airwaves by storm: Heroes, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, etc. The article gives a fascinating insight into this creative aspect of geek culture ... it began back in the days of Star Trek and Star Wars .... it began with fandom.

All these uber-creatives were huge fans. Take Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly: “I don’t understand creators who aren’t fans….My experience as a fan was, things that I loved, I loved very hard – Marvel Comics, science fiction, Dickens, Shakespeare, Sondhiem. The things I was a geek about, I was a serious geek about.” This kind of fanatical devotion is what Kevin Roberts analyzes in his book Lovemarks “Today the stakes have reached a new high. The social fabric is spread more thinly than ever. People are looking for new emotional connections. They are looking for what they can love. They are insisting on more choice, they have higher expectations, and they need emotional pull to help them make decisions. And finally, they want more ways to connect with everything in their lives -- including brands.” These creative elites intuitively understand that fans feel passionate about the imaginitive worlds, and they will want to play in them .... creators need to give those fans room in which to play ... and create and expand the universe. In the 70s and 80s this was done through fan conventions and fan fiction. Now it's done through transmedia storytelling.

Transmedia means telling the story across multiple platforms .... allowing multiple points of access into the imaginitive world. This is different from cross-promotion, the old marketing idea that when you made a movie, franchise the rights to McDonalds so you can have the happy meal. This is actually expanding the story in different places.

The article uses the TV show Heroes as an example. Beyond the weekly show, there are graphic novels that explore the lives of some of the minor characters, there are online games that allow you to experience some of the imaginitive world yourself, there are websites for the fictional companies that exist in the show, there are web extras that allow users to get into the commentary from the creators, there are official fan sites that allow fans to submit their own artwork. One could immerse themselves in the story as much as they want.

This really is no great surprise. Pine and Gilmore foretold this kind of transition in their work Experience Economy .... Way back in 2000 they posited that we were moving away from an economy based off goods and services to an economy that provided experiences. Their book detailed a taxonomy of the types of experiences people could enjoy and talked about how businesses of all sorts could transition to the experience economy.

And thus, the question becomes, what can we in the church learn?
1) from Fandom and Lovemarks, we learn something about the nature of committment. Many of the wars that happen within churches do not arise from apathy....they arise from Love. Take the worship wars for instance. The argument over traditional vs contemporary music is not simply an intellectual debate .... music has the power to stir deeply, and when they take "our" music away, they are messing with "our" world. Forget all the rationales one way or another and try to understand this from a fan perspective .... it's not much different than the which is cooler, Star Wars or Star Trek, debate ... The difference in the church is that we're expected to all get along and move forward together. We don't really have the option of saying "those crazy trekkies." and surrounding ourselves in a cocoon of our own preference. Perhaps understanding something of fan mentality will help us have a little more empathy for one another in the church.

2) Using transmedia. We in the church need to figure out ways to do church across multiple platforms. This doesn't mean we set up an "I-church" on Second Life and use that as our sole spiritual experience. that's not transmedia, that's replacing one media with another. Rather, we need to find ways that our multiple media complement each other. I believe that a physical presence in Sunday Worship is absolutely vital to our Christian growth and committment to a community of believers. But are there ways we can tell our story and bond together beyond that. Are there ways we can invite an "extended family" to continue to be a loose part of a congregation? Are there ways we can leverage technology to allow people to easily go deeper should they so desire? Transmedia is much more than setting up a static web-page ... it's creating online experiences that complement what is coming up.

so for instance .... we have a mission trip coming up this summer....to Waxhaw, NC. How could we use gaming technology, online experiences, etc, to help extend that mission trip to people who aren't able to physically be there?

Looking forward to your thoughts.
Soli Deo Gloria
Russell

Bits and Pieces

Here are some lovely little thoughts to brighten your evening:

Joe Carter offers this surprising reflection on Christians and "animal welfare" (as opposed to "animal rights").

Healthbolt reminds us that music does soothe the mind, ease depression, and generally helps put the mind at ease. Let's put a little more Bach and Mozart into our days.

PSFK Trendwatching links to this cool video that explains the concept of Web 2.0. It might be a little too stylistic for some folks, but I think it gets the idea across well.

From the same PSFK Trendwatching site -- a story about the upcoming Shutdown day -- a day in which we are all challenged to go without our computers for one single day. Have we really come to this? Are we this deeply wired?

And finally Peter Bronson lays down a royal flush on this one-- he tells the story of a Boy Scout group uninviting a speaker .... because his company sponsored a rude trashy promo stunt.

Bits and Pieces -- Saturday Feb 24

Lots of interesting articles out there, but little time to comment on them today. Here's a sampling of what has caught my interest and is stewing in my noggin:

• Dan Elelen put up this great reflection on Television and passive entertainment versus the person to person passing along of wisdom from generation to generation. Needless to say, he comes down on the side of person to person wisdom. Note to Covenant-First readers -- check this out as we talk about Family Ministry this year.
• Meanwhile, Healthbolt points to this article reminding us about the physical effects of excessive television for children. I wonder what they would say about recreational internet use?
• The Wall Street Journal reports on tightening regulations on payday lenders. I've long been a vocal critic of the Payday Loan industry as little more than institutionalized loan sharking. It sounds like states are cracking down on the opportunists
• Ann Althouse points to this NYT article about the Paris University literature professor who is offering a course on "How to talk about books you haven't read" -- is it the apex of Philistinism, or is it a clever way of encouraging people to actually try reading? Read the article and decide for yourself.

Soli Deo Gloria

Russell

Where do you get your information??

In the rapidly changing media landscape, there will be winners and losers -- most traditional newspapers are hemhorraging readers, losing readers faster than Hillary is losing supporters to Barak Obama. I know I've become the worst nightmare for network TV -- I'm the guy who in the 1980's used to know the primetime lineup for all the major networks for every night of the week -- now, I don't have cable, and I almost never watch primetime TV. I just let my subscription to Time Magazine lapse because it's just plain irrelevant to me. So the question is -- where do I get most of my information? I pull from all over -- here are my best resources, and I'd be very interested in hearing about yours -- use the combox liberally....

• Word of Mouth -- by far, the best resource I have is word of mouth (or via personal contact or through weblogs) of friends. The aggregate impact of this kind of person to person information sharing is huge. Long before everyone was talking about the DaVinci code, I had 2 or 3 people ask me about it -- word of mouth. Most of the films I watch are recommendations of friends. I've bought books on the recommendation of friends. This word of mouth resource of information is by far the most potent tool we all have, especially in this uber-networked era.
• World Magazine -- News from an unabashedly traditional Christian viewpoint. World has been at the news game for a couple of decades now -- they cover stories that the traditional news media just plain avoid. This week's issue, for instance, is a comprehensive look at the contemporary slave trade in the world. They've spent a lot of ink on human trafficking and justice issues. They cover political candidates that the other news outlets ignore -- while NPR, Time, and CNN talk about Clinton and Obama and Romney and McCain, World has the chutzpah to give profiles on Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Duncan Hunter. Top that off with some of the freshest cultural commentary out there, and you've got a pretty potent mag.
• Fast Company -- Covering business, technology, new media, and luxury lifestyle from a "socially conscious" stance, this magazine has been for 10 years one of the leaders in the digital economy. This is a great resource for those who want to be on the leading edge of actual business entrepreneurs, rather than in the never never land of the "bleeding edge" of digimaniacs. Invariably, my Fast Company issues are marked up, dogeared and I've got a dozen little notes of ideas to follow up on.
• The Utne Reader -- A quarterly mag that I think of as the best of the left. Rather than a news mag, Utne is something of a lifestyle piece, collecting stories and think pieces from self styled progressive periodicals. There's an awful lot that I disagree with in this publication, but there's also a lot of careful, thoughtful, and in-depth writing that rattles around in my ears.
• NPR -- I spend a lot of time in my car, and most of the news/talk shows on NPR are still quite thoughtful. Everything from the business oriented Marketplace (actually produced by rival network American Public Media, but distributed on NPR affiliate stations) to the freewheeling Talk of the Nation -- it can be by turns maddening or enlightening, but it's a far improvement over the tedium of CNN.
• Presbyweb -- Hans and the Presbyweb team have done a consistently good job of filtering through the mass of news stories and presenting news that is of interest to presbyterians only. However, don't think that it's only for presbyterians -- a good 2/3 of each day's digest is news of interest to Christians in general: everything from reports from the worldwide church to cultural analysis, to religion in the news. The very nice thing about presbyweb is their "pay us what it's worth to you" policy -- it's a kind of barter system. I suggest a hearty payment, for their work is worth it.

There are a lot of other sources that I use, but this summarizes my best "go to list" --

For a flipside, however, here are the sources that I've used...and dropped:

• BoingBoing -- this multi-author weblog bills itself as "a directory of wonderful things" and I was an enthusiastic reader for about a year. I picked up on one or two stories that were of interest. However I began to notice a certain redundancy among the contributers. It kept coming back to digital rights, disney stuff, weird things people do, science fiction, and sex. Quite honestly, the thing just bores me now. It's supposed to be a collection of the greatest stuff from the cyber-elites -- it is one of the most read weblogs out there. However all it shows is a shallow fascination with "cool" -- I've unsubscribed.
• Time -- let my subscription lapse on this one. It's not that its a bad magazine -- just that it's not very timely. This year, they chose "You" as the person of the year -- celebrating the advent of consumer created content on the web -- it's just that the story was a year too late. It's old news now. While many of their feature stories are interesting, they are but regurgitations of what I hear on NPR; meanwhile the cultural commentary on books and film is generally uninteresting.
• Leadership -- I have a new theory that by the time something hits the cover of leadership magazine, it is already irrelevant to me. Leadership seems to be a magazine that is written by large church pastors of the baby boom era for large church pastors of the baby boom era. Somebody at the magazine needs to take a long hard look at Dilbert comic strips and realize that such truths apply to churches as well.

Looking forward to your picks (and pans)

Excelsior

Russell