Ethical Media Platforms: An Introduction
This is a series of short essays on how Maven is building a video platform built around community resonance and micropayments.
Contents:
Macro trends indicate that creator sentiment, technical advances around the distribution and attribution of creative works, consumer behaviour around ad-supported platforms, are leading us into a media ecology that empowers individual makers, values community resonance over ad-supported incentives and will open up space for new types of media formats.
The next YouTube will not be a traditional platform. It will start and end with the creators, makers and individuals who produce good works.
A short biography
Technology for me has always been an opportunity to push toward building more empowering tools. As a product designer figuring out how video, this most powerful medium, could be used to enhance not just the experience of viewership but also the forward engagement and individual agency of viewers and creators has always been important.
Over the last eight years I’ve worked in areas which I’ve felt are the most important. For Al Jazeera News I produced video content, campaign media for organisations such as Amnesty International and WarChild UK. I’ve worked in places as far-flung as Central Africa, South-East Asia and Central America documenting human rights issues including media suppression using video. In all these cases I’ve seen how important the medium can be used to shift minds, affect change and inspire.
More recently I’ve worked with a group of very talented individuals to advance interactive video technology in order to push more contextual media formats. I’ve produced interactive web-series for Virgin Media and designed and help build new technologies that aim to increase the capacity of video is capable of.
Now we’re introducing a new kind of platform built around this technology.
One of the biggest problems I see with content on the internet today is economic. In an era where creative content is leveraged by platforms to generate huge amounts of wealth by monetising attention, we tend to see dwindling returns for those who create content. This has ramifications not just in the arts - which is a community I consider myself part of - but also in terms of the fundamental institutions we rely on such as news journalism and individual rights groups who, for the most part, have our best interests at heart.
Commercial benefits accruing disproportionately against creative content makers end up concentrating wealth, power — as well as taste — to those that run what Jaron Lanier calls ‘Siren Servers’. The opportunity therefore to align a new venture with that of a wider movement, those who are also concerned with the state of ethics and economics in design, is of deep personal conviction.
Maven: A higher ground for video makers
I’ll be discussing the key concepts behind Maven in a series of short essays. These essays draw from UX and design ethics questions posed in the Livable Media research areas of Critical Media, New Metrics, Designing For Agency and Business Models and Governance. I’ll go through these concerns individually and demonstrate how this will be applied to our work on Maven, a video platform for independent video makers which is currently in open beta.
The challenges presented when building a more thoughtful video platform are clear and almost existential. Any new video platform will always be lumped into other groups of attention economy rabbit-holes. These are businesses that have thus far been built around increasing watchtime, viewing figures and incentivising around advertising models.
If we aren’t careful, our platform will be susceptible to regressing into these familiar tropes. We’re mindful of this but I’m a believer in video. It is undoubtedly the most emotionally resonant medium we have to communicate an idea, message or story.
Harnessing platform drivers and ethical design in order to encourage richer experiences, economic benefits for creators, and fostering a community based on reasoned values should absolutely be the business of the new generation of video platforms.
In sum:
No interface is neutral. We will design Maven as a platform tilted toward makers of good work who care about safe, enriching environments for their communities to engage within.
Micro-Goal: Help independent video makers earn sustainable recurring community funding for their content and form deeper, lasting relationships with their community of viewers.
Macro-Goal: Introduce a model for transitioning away from attention metrics (views, clickthroughs) used by behavior based economic models like YouTube to one based on reasoned metrics which maximise user’s economic and social benefits.
Maven is built by a team of six from the interactive video company Storygami. I am the co-founder and head of product and design.
