LIVE INTERNET
Every morning as I step onto the subway I wedge myself into a crowded car and immediately plug in my earphones and turn on a podcast.
It is just about all I can do to be somewhat productive on my roughly 30 minute commute to Columbus Circle.
I am not very loyal to one particular podcast and I typically change it up based on whatever most interests me that day. As I listen I am always a little bothered that the podcast I am listening to is not live.
We humans love flaws, we love to point out flaws and we love to see our fellow humans in action where anything can happen. Most productions, even live productions mitigate all risk to make sure that nothing does happen however something always happens even subtly, and that is what people love about live broadcasting.
Much of the content we consume on the internet is pre-recorded. Not just pre-recorded but completely canned, like sardines, neatly placed in a little tin and a little stinky.
I liken it to the stack of magazines you find at the doctors office. Mostly out of date but you end up reading them anyway to pass the time.
As I listen to my podcasts or read a saved article there is this little voice in my head that keeps bugging me to acknowledge that mediums like TV and radio still have a certain charm that the internet simply hasn’t matured into yet.
That is truly live content.
The more I consume the more I find myself thirsting for the breadth of content that is available to be live. I want to see .jpgs being posted in realtime, Tweets being composed while I watch, I want to hear podcasts recorded live, I want to see my Facebook feed update in realtime without having to press refresh and get some kind of non-chronological algorithmic feed that presumes my brain will make some sense of.
I want to anticipate that something, anything, can happen so that I can react to it. Isn’t that what the internet is all about?
Live TV has proven to be one of the most engaged with mediums online. People turn on the TV, tune into a live event and then get on Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or whatever and react. I want to react to the internet the same way I react to Live television or live radio.
It amazes me that with all of the technological advances we have made over the last decade and how robust the internet has become we still haven’t cracked the code on how to create quality live (web) content.
The closest thing I have seen to what I think it is I am talking about is what Doritos did with Periscope and even that seemed canned.
I have no proof of this, but I believe that the success that many of the cast members of SNL was predicated on the fact that they took the stage live. They snickered and cracked up, they improvised their way to success. We find these actors appealing because they put themselves in a position to fail and fail miserably. But they dont. Ok some did…
The beauty of storytelling is that the teller is also affected by the story being told and part of telling a great story is seeing the teller become emotionally part of that story. Watching their eyes well up or their voice crack or thier body suddenly move in a a way that we can connect to.
Think about the best videos on YouTube, videos that garner millions and millions of views, two toddlers in the back seat of a car and one bites the other’s finger… WTF? Why does something like that permeate through culture while a big budget, beautifully produced piece of content that cost millions to make barely scratch the surface of our attention?
I can go on and on, to be quite honest I didn’t really plan on writing this post. I typically do some research, compile some notes and then edit properly… I just had this nagging feeling inside of me this morning that spurned these words to come out.
The next time you are at a live event notice how many people are experiencing that event through the lens of their smartphone, how many people sitting right up front in the first row with a phone in front of their face so they can try and capture something that is happening right in front of them.
That is a clue. It is a clue as to what people want, they want the best of both worlds seamlessly connected.
They want a Live Internet… or maybe its just me. I want a Live Internet.
