Shame follows Michael Fassbender (sometimes we follow a little too much of him) playing a lonely sex addict in Manhatten, unable to form romantic connections and getting off on his impersonal encounters with prostitutes and porn. In an interview with Salon, Shame’s director Steve McQueen says the film is firmly rooted in the dilemmas of 2011:

We’re making a film about now. It’s not a costume drama, it’s not something that happened 40 or 50 years ago. It’s about now, and for me — I don’t care what anyone says — I think cinema has a responsibility. You’ve got HBO and AMC doing whatever they’re doing, but cinema has another way of doing things, which can actually be closer to how we live today than any nine-part series on television. Absolutely. We can do that, and people are interested in seeing that and having a conversation about it.

What happens when you make a film about now is that it does have an aspect of social commentary because it’s urgent, there’s an immediacy about it. Particularly about the Internet, about pornography on the Internet, and about how that affects us, how we navigate this maze of sexual content that’s all about us.

When I came out of the cinema, my immediate thought was to wonder what several young male friends of mine would think if they watched Shame, given their attachment to online porn. Simply put (and this is simplifying hugely), Fassbender’s sex addiction and the ready availability of porn and prostitutes essentially destroy his ability to relate to women in the context of a relationship. Sex is shown without tenderness, and when offered the opportunity of a meaningful connection, Fassbender’s character can’t get it up. Instead, he gets off on a series of rough, brief encounters, some of which directly recreate scenes from pornography.

I wouldn’t like to give you the impression that online porn is the main focus of the film – it actually plays a relatively small role. McQueen weaves it into the fabric of  daily existence, perhaps as the average porn viewer does, and it is this which is so clever. Much of the initial porn debate focussed on how graphic content – readily available online and less easily regulated than paid-for porn – might encourage rape. Many studies concluded that porn was “harmless” in this respect, which is probably true, but few stats focus on the impact on everyday relationships – something McQueen attempts to address. This prescient piece in the Guardian from 2003 is a good companion piece to Shame on the relationship of sex addiction and porn. ”Pornography does damage,” says one psychologist, “because it encourages people to make their home in shallow relationships.” It’s a subject where it’s all too easy to get all Daily Mail and prudish. Light viewing it is not, but Shame is a thought-provoking, subtle and overdue look at the cause and effect of sex addiction in the online age.

The evening kicked off with a keynote from EMI’s strategy SVP Jim Brady, where he said selling (physical) records no longer helps artists, which I’ve already reported on for StrategyEye.

But an equally fascinating part of the speech was Brady’s summary of changing attitudes towards music consumption over the last twenty years. He outlined three models of  contemporary music consumer – whom he dubbed Tower Man, MP3 Man and Homo Spotifyicus – and their evolving music habits.  I’ve posted a transcript of that section of the speech below – worth a read in full for an idea of how the majors are trying to frame the pace of change.

–

The Tower Man

We’re in the early 90s, life is blessedly uncomplicated. The digital disruption has yet to arrive – we have what we would call the well-behaved pre-digital music fan. He – statistically it’s a he – listens to radio, he reads NME or Billboard, he watches MTV and on Saturday he goes down to his local high street record store and buys what he’s been listening to. We call this man Tower Man after the late-lamented Tower Records retail chain which shuttered in 2006.

Buying music is really is the only way Tower Man can control the listening experience. He doesn’t control radio. So music is a scarce good – ownership is hugely important. In fact in many ways, Tower Man defines himself by the music that he owns, by his wall of CDs and you’ll often find him quietly judging others by their wall of CDs. You know who you are.

MP3 Man / iPod Man

Let’s now move to the second half of the nineties and the arrival of what we call the transitional music fan. The MP3 codec’s been around for a while, and by 1999 it’s formed Napster and Codester and an endless variety of stirs that offer free digitised music. Labels lose ‘monopoly control’ over the availability of the music.

For the tech savvy music fan, it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. But only if you’re particularly tech savvy – the technical hurdles are quite considerable for the large majority of music fans. You might think all that access to all that music that the case for ownership would diminish, that music would feel less rare. But Early MP3 Man grew up musically in a time of scarcity, and the ownership habits of his parents are still ingrained. He’s got one leg over the digital fence. He reacts with the normal reaction – he starts to hoard. College networks start crashing, labels start suing, piracy becomes the topic of every music conference you go to and the market shifts in a fundamental way. CD sales start to decline, nothing new there. Of course MP3s also offered a high level of convenience, more than the CD or cassette. Music fans have shown quite consistently they will pay more money for music convenience. [...]

Apple makes a typically late, thoughtful entry into the  emerging mp3 player marketplace. In 2003 it launches iTunes and our MP3 Man becomes iPod/iPhone man. So your entire music collection all on a cool little gadget so now you don’t have to break the law to join the digital revolution, you don’t have to be tech savvy  – but it does tempt a bunch of new fans across that first digital divide.

The true digital fan – Homo Spotifyicus

As a music industry, we spend a lot time getting to grips with iPod man and rightly so. But we can’t get too blinkered by them – let’s move forward to the late Naughties. This is when we see the emergence of a true digital fan, and they are quite different from the previous two. For them, commercial music has never really been scarce, never been hard to access. We call that generation Homo Spotifyicus, sometimes Facebook man. And for Homo Spotifyicus, music is just around them all the time. [It's in] many new radio stations they might listen to over the internet, it’s in their parents’ CD collection (they have access to that), it’s on their elder siblings’ iPods, its on YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, it’s in the TV shows they follow, it’s in the films they watch, ads, video clips on Facebook, even in the computer games they play. True digital fans do not have  a very strong ownership habit. What matters is instant gratification – being able to access that song straightaway wherever they are. To borrow a phrase from another arena, they’re not looking to collect Mr Right, they’re looking for Mr Right Now, musically. Of course we know there are open porous borders between these three groups of fans.

I genuinely dislike these photo filter apps – the most popular being Instagram and Hipstamatic (even the names are intolerable) – and find it surprising that a generation of super-connected people choose to filter their lives through an artificial aesthetic which belongs to the 1970s. Pop culture’s nostalgia for history, to recast the present against the golden haziness of the past is hardly anything new, as testified by the ongoing popularity of retro dramas like Mad Men, or (in the UK) The Hour. But the tendency seeps across the media more widely, to interesting, if not always commendable, effect. Take Foreign Policy, which chose to host a photo essay on the war in Afghanistan dubbed “The War in Hipstamatic“. The essay consists of a series of highly coloured photographs of the war in Afghanistan which recall, to borrow Hipstamatic’s own chirpy tagline, ”the look and feel of plastic toy cameras from the past”.

A filtered photo (complete with faux Polaroid edging) of a soldier in Afghanistan, from the Basetrack media project and presented in Foreign Policy's "The War in Hipstamatic"

The NYT’s Damon Winter has won plaudits earlier this year for a similar project – so clearly not everyone feels quite as offended as I do by this. Indeed, Winter writes an articulate defence of his choice, saying that using Hipstamatic has no effect on the actual content of his war photography. It is worth reading in full.

What has gotten people so worked up, I believe, falls under the heading of aesthetics. Some consider the use of the phone camera as a gimmick or as a way to aestheticize news photos. Those are fair arguments, but they have nothing to do with the content of the photos.

I disagree. Recasting Afghanistan in grainy colours feels, at gut level, like an insult both to journalism and the soldiers who face a much greyer reality on a daily basis, and the aesthetics actually distract from the content.

Of course, you could ask how far this snobbery should trickle down, and to what extent using any filters in photography is trickery. The simple answer is that I don’t know; I’m not inherently against people experimenting with Diana cameras or or Polaroids. But with more and more people taking retro photos as the norm, rather than the novelty, this insistence on recasting the present is going to get tiresome at best.

Newspapers must be pretty confusing if you’re a non-Twitter user. The Speaker’s wife, Sally Bercow, would be missed by her “followers” before she enters the Celebrity Big Brother house, said the Standard. Republican candidates spar over their scientific beliefs (or disbeliefs) via status updates, according to the Guardian. The media’s always had its sources of information – but few have been so prolifically or prominently publicised as Twitter, much to the puzzlement of its readership, which asks itself why it should care and, increasingly, whether it should join in.

Why would I use Twitter?

The reasons for using Twitter are manifold, and rather than try and think them all up, I asked people why they use the site.

“	Writing a post about joining Twitter for non-journalism, non-geeky friends who are curious. What do you personally use Twitter for, please?
	shonaghosh August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh well, predominantly to feel part of a crowd of successful writers that I am clearly not part of in real life. Tragically.
	nellstevens August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh good for mid-football match updates #nffc
	simonlp August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh News, updates, random links…
	eleanorturney August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh news and making fun of Jesse
	elliottchilds August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh replying late in non-Twitter fashion but as an expat I use it to feel less removed from London life…
	SongsIlike August 23, 2011

Following your niche interests

Already, this is quite different from Facebook. On its homepage, Facebook tells you to “Connect with your friends” – by contrast, Twitter’s tagline is “Follow your interests” – and you can really follow specific topics to quite a niche level. One of my niche and slightly pretentious interests is finding ace things to do in London, usually based around design, modern art or literature – so I follow @Proteinfeed which, if you click the link, shows a bunch of quite cryptic but always-intriguing links. Unlike Google, where you have to know what you’re looking for to begin with, there’s often a kind of serendipity about discovering things through Twitter. Another feed for discovering beautiful art is @Brainpicker, who is arguably far more effective on Twitter than she is on her site.

I don’t think I can emphasise this discovery element enough. Yes, newspapers, magazines and blogs can all provide you with quite specific information – and I’m certainly not disputing their value. But firstly, unlike some of the above, Twitter is free. Secondly, if you have carefully followed a very set group of niche tweeters – that no mainstream newspaper or magazine will ever discover – which is entirely tailored to your interests, then that, surely, has to be better than something designed to appeal to the masses. I admit that that following people can be time consuming – but I would argue it only requires an initial burst of work, of finding people to follow, before your feed becomes invaluable.

Twitter as a news source – floods of information

I was asked this by my friend Claire Hance via e-mail. She says she doesn’t use Twitter, but has frequently seen it referenced in the media and is tempted to try it:

…to me Twitter feels like another layer of complication in the myriad outlets from which we can garner our information. We can read newspapers/ magazine website, and when looking for more specified info, can use blogs/ special interest websites/ guides. So why is a space for mass short bursts of minute information in a (what seems) fairly muddled arena so useful[?]

I would agree that as a source of general news, Twitter can add unnecessary complication. And if you aren’t too fussed about knowing about news first, and knowing every aspect of the story as it emerges, then I would advise against following any news journalists. Much of Twitter’s reputation as a source of news comes from the fact that many of its most active users are journalists, or would-be journalists. Being one myself, I suspect that it will have an increasing role in relation to news, and particularly emergencies, as time goes on. Imagine if a bomb went off in London. You still have phone signal, but the news crews haven’t reached the disaster area yet, and the rescue services have yet to piece together what’s happened. Often, then, an effective way to find out what’s going on is from a social network – and Twitter, being mostly uncluttered by photo features and so on, is a much cleaner service to use for this kind of thing than Facebook, which isn’t really geared to handle ongoing streams of information.

Of course, bombs don’t go off every day in London, and a continuous stream of live, rolling updates from places which are struck by tragedy or warfare can be exhausting, and sullied by unverified information and rumours. And that is damaging to journalism, and unhelpful for readers. I would say that you don’t always have to follow news sources all the time. It is possible to stop following people without offending them.

There are many more points I could address about Twitter as a valid source of news, but, another time.

Ego and networks

Relative Twitter newcomer, @Agshorsley emailed me her own reasons for using the service, which I found remarkably refreshing.

I think primarily the reason I signed up was because I found it a good place to talk about myself (aware of how horrible this sounds) without having to constantly update my facebook status. I hate those people who update their status every 15 minutes and yet sometimes I would – horror of horrors – find myself updating my status 2-3 times a day. Basically, simple VANITY drove me to sign up.

Ego, as with all social media, is a huge part of Twitter - I use it to post links to my journalism, in a naked attempt to become more widely read. But, I would also say that networking (grurgh) is a huge part of this. Even if it is ego-driven, like @NellStevens, I use Twitter to talk to tech journalists who I would otherwise never have the opportunity to meet, let alone discuss the future of Nokia with as a peer. And this networking aspecting doesn’t just need to apply to writers and journalists – there are many influential marketers, PR types, politicians, designers and even lawyers who use Twitter, and if you’re ambitious and know what you’re doing, it is entirely possible to break into these circles – which offline might once have remained closed – through social media.

A common misconception

A final email from a naysayer, who shall remain anonymous:

When I hear [Twitter] being talked about on the news, or on tv, it generally is quoting celebrities (pop stars, footballers, comedians) saying, in my opinion, not very much.  I see it is a big, constantly updating collection of facebook statuses for people to tell others absolutely nothing of genuine interest about anything.  It just seems to be yet another form of faceless communication, combined with a further outlet for the cult of celebrity.

Of course, Twitter can be outlet for banal celebrity crap, and if that’s all you follow, then that’s all you’ll get. In much the same way, you could watch Panorama, or you could watch Jeremy Kyle. But on the other end of the scale, you can also hear what it’s like for rebels on the ground in Libya. If your Twitter feed is banal, it is because you are following banal people – more serious is the site’s impact on accurate reporting, and the spread of rumours. Always best to take things with a pinch of salt…

And um, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter, I’m here.

Personal politics: all of my folks hate all o’ your folks

Pie-blocking-ninja-wife Wendi hates Rebekah. Elisabeth hates Rebekah. All the Murdoch kids hate Wendi. News Corp execs hate Wendi. Rupert can’t take anyone’s side for fear of antagonising the kids or Wendi. That’s roughly the gist of the interpersonal relationships.

Rupert: the man

After that performance in the Parliamentary select committee, Rupert’s reputation as a media dynamo is somewhat on the wane – with Wolff, as Will Sturgeon puts it, sticking the boot in. But there are curious contradictions in Wolff’s observations – since I haven’t read his account, I can’t determine whether that’s because Wolff isn’t a particularly astute observer, or because Murdoch is himself contradictory. The latter, I suspect. Wolff describes Murdoch – to whom he consistently refers by his first name – as “autistic” and “aspergistic” in his interpersonal failures, and apparent inattention. Yet in the same breath, he claims this is a man who spends the majority of time worrying about, and being “in love with his family”.

Wolff is asked, bluntly, “Do you like him?”. A long pause follows, then, “Yes. I did like him.”

Murdoch’s personality isn’t, in and of itself, necessarily that interesting but provides a helpful backdrop for…

Lying to Parliament?

Discussing the select committee, Wolff is adamant in his insistence that Murdoch Sr., at least, was not performing. He later said – though he didn’t outright accuse the family of lying – that Murdoch “knew everything” about what happened at his papers, which means that the majority of his Parliamentary statements were nothing but performance. The consequences of Murdoch and his son lying to MPs have been chewed over many times elsewhere, so I won’t go into it.

Keeping the Times/Sunday Times taint-free

Wolff hints, with serious implications, that the Times (which has asserted its editorial independence throughout the hacking claims) was not free from interference. He offers little by way of proof however, beyond accounts of phone calls to editors and a pervasive culture at News International to do everything possible to please the top boss. The implication being that, without direct instruction, editors took certain decisions – like cutting articles inconvenient to Murdoch’s business interests - to keep things flowing smoothly. Wolff’s radical solution – which will no doubt cause smirks at Kings Place – is for News International to drop the Sun (another toxic brand, presumably) and keep the Times and ST free of the taint by…putting them in a trust, not dissimilar to the Scott Trust/Guardian arrangement, to “save British journalism”.

I like boxes to put people in…

But however premature the evaluation, it doesn’t seem clear who or what Google+ wants – and this to me is a problem, whatever stage the service is at. I was at university when Facebook came to the UK, and exactly the kind of user the social network was targeting. Much of its appeal was the fact that it was only open to certain networks – a master stroke. It wasn’t the elitism that was clever, but the fostering of niche communities. By the time Facebook opened out to any user with an e-mail address, the service had become too valuable for its existing users to utter anything more than a low rumble of discontent before continuing much as they had done before.

So being archetypal of the original Facebook generation, it feels quite important to be able to have a strong theme tying my social connections together. My experience on Twitter was similar; after two years on the service, it has become a valuable journalistic network. I don’t agree with GigaOm’s Marshall Kirkpatrick in all aspects of his review, but he says much the same thing:

….groups are the secret weapon of the social web. Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it. List creation on competing services has been a mixed bag. It’s undervalued at Twitter and suffocated on Facebook.

Just not that many boxes. 

Google+ understands this need for filtration, to some degree. If Facebook’s flaw is that it doesn’t let you filter enough, Google+ wants you to filter too much, too soon. The maniacal insistence on THE CIRCLES is simply confusing when I have no one to put in them, when I am simply getting my head around what kind of user will be on here to begin with. Presumably, my e-mail contacts. But my e-mail contacts are a motley crew of friends, colleagues,  people I want to network with,  and people I’ve never met.  That’s similar to Twitter – but the difference is that I follow whoever I like on Twitter and then put them into lists as I navigate the service and the stream of information. I don’t try and pre-define the flow of that information, the way that Circles essentially wants me to.

Google+ needs to work out what it’s for

If Google is genuinely throwing down the gauntlet to Facebook here, then it needs to understand who would want to use it. Let’s not pretend it wants to be Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is ace – but the site’s still relatively niche, and its most valuable activity comes from a small core of loyal users.

Google, for all the innovation and creativity it encourages from its employee, has an unfortunate history of lacking vision in social media Speaking at a conference earlier this year, Google’s creative director in the UK was on the defensive about Google+ predecessor, Wave. His first point was that Wave was “ahead of its time”. The second, that sometimes “at Google, sometimes we don’t know if we create things for [the public], or for ourselves”. Telling, no?

That’s certainly not to say Google+ will fail. It’s better designed than its social predecessors Buzz (unfortunately, Buzz still lives in Google+), and has much, much more focus than Wave. The service might also simply better suit those who have not been indoctrinated with the ‘Facebook way’.

There are also a number of nifty sub-features which I can see taking off. Huddle is a mobile app which is essentially Google’s answer to WhatsApp, an extremely popular little mobile messaging service. Hangouts showcases Google’s video chat capabilities, which might threaten the new Facebook-Skype partnership (not least because the new Facebook Chat layout looks, frankly, pants).

It’s early days – but at the moment, Google+ feels like hard work. In its launch post, Google says:

Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.

You’re not there just yet, Google.

The service already displayed this to users who insisted on repeating songs or artists more than a certain number of times:

We had to skip your song because our music licenses force us to limit the number of times an artist can be played each hour in a room. Playing the next song in your list that is in compliance.

Capping the number of times a user could play an artist/song will have kept Turntable.fm the right side of copyright laws in the US. Users of Spotify’s free service face exactly the same restriction; as did Last.fm’s before the site dropped its on-demand streaming service. Given that Turntable.fm still has to pay monthly fees, it’ll be interesting to see how the service will monetise where many of its fellows have failed. Pete Kafka at All Things Digital explores some of the legal issues further.

As he notes, Turntable.fm “feels pretty special”. It does, and its occasional drawbacks don’t detract from its core offering. It’s not quite up there to replace Spotify – the current format of the service makes it a massive drain on your time, because you spend so long searching for and choosing songs. But then again, sharing music this way is so addictive, you find yourself wanting to immerse yourself for hours at a time. Which for a weeks-old service, is a pretty good sign.

Additionally, Turntable.fm asks for your Facebook credentials – which helps reduce spam and keep it to a relevant social circle. Having said that, the service doesn’t actually show which of your Facebook friends is already on the service, which seems like a silly omission. Instead, on joining, you’re left stumbling around trying to navigate what is meant to be a social platform entirely on your own.

Given the need for Facebook credentials to use it, 140,000 users is actually likely to be pretty accurate an indicator of unique users.

Some kinks need ironing out

I signed up to the service about a week ago and found some definite gaps. Matt Galligan outlines some in his post here, which will apply when Turntable.fm becomes a more advanced service, but there are still some issues even at a quite basic level.

1. Seriously, the Facebook login is annoying. Turntable.fm has perhaps tried to be a little too clever as a social service, by telling beta users that they can only login if one other Facebook friend is already on the service. Given I logged in without trouble, I presume I did. Except I don’t know who it is, and therefore can’t find them for some shared DJ-ing. Meaning that I, in turn, had to separately email some friends, get them to login at the same time as me, and start DJ-ing. Which is great for signing up users, but poor for navigation, as it just ends up with new batches of people stumbling around the site in confusion.
2. If you create a room, you have the option of making it private, so only those with the link can join in. Great idea – except you can’t change this once it’s been set.
3. The search function seems a little skewed. Searching for Bon Iver (or anyone) doesn’t seem to display songs in any particular chronology, not even by album. This means you potentially end up playing crappy demo versions of songs, as they display just as high on search results as regular studio songs.
4. Matt Gilligan makes this point in his post, but cross-referencing with other music services would be a boost. Turntable.fm’s library is pretty good, but hardly niche. And given this is aimed at, potentially, serious music lovers it’s worth filling out the gaps.
5. The creator of the room automatically becomes its moderator, booting out anyone who swears on the chat function, plays U2, etc. It would be handy if you could pass the baton to someone else.
6. I know it’s against the point, but you can’t restrict who DJ’s and who doesn’t. If you want someone to stop DJ’ing, you need to boot them out of the room entirely, which is a little unfriendly.

Two things struck me. One was a surprising unwillingness to acknowledge how high the risk of iterating the mistakes of the music industry was. Another was Sony’s presence in the room, something I imagine hadn’t happened before.

Some background – e-book sales are growing quickly in the UK, though they are far from overtaking print sales, generating £3.1bn in revenues last year (Publishers Association). I can’t actually find an up-to-date comparison with print sales, but Hachette’s digital head says e-books might account for about 10% of its revenues this year, while Penguin and Faber & Faber place it at 7%. Meanwhile, print sales have fallen 3% by volume.

I should admit that I am very, very new to covering the publishing industry and e-books. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the attitude of Penguin’s (incredibly articulate, and apparently sensible) CFO on e-book pricing and piracy.  BML conducted research into consumer attitudes towards e-books and found that they expect e-books to be up to 70% cheaper than the print versions. Most publishers drop prices at most by 50%…and that’s  only 50% off the recommended retail price, which actually tends to be more expensive than what you’d pay on the high street. So in all probability, you’d pay on average much the same for an e-book as you would buying its print counterpart on the high street.

Penguin (and others’) justification was this – that while e-books cost nothing to print, the cost of editorial and marketing remain the same. There’s also a hefty slice of VAT to pay, unlike print. In summary:

“The idea that there is going to be a substantial reduction in e-book prices compared to physical, I don’t think can happen.” – Coram Williams, Penguin.

I found it interesting that it fell to a digital entrepreneur, Lovingreading’s Peter Crawshaw to sound the alarm:

“People don’t value electronic things as much as physical things. I think the format issue is interesting, because we have now got two such huge global players who are outside the publishing industry. [Digital] formats are here to stay - you can see now on our website the prices of iBooks and Kindles are now pretty much in synchrony, so somebody is monitoring that very carefully.  The real test will be for the e-publishing format which really has to step up to the mark and look to defend itself because of these two huge players that have come into the market.”

This, I thought, was the single most sensible thing anyone said, particularly with Sony sitting in the room. There was brief mention of Sony’s Qriocity platform – a sort of iTunes equivalent which will eventually offer e-books. Indeed, in Sony’s own words, “We are, in fact, a publisher.” Given what iTunes did to music pricing, I wonder if those words shouldn’t start ringing alarm bells.