How to Have a Good Idea
A unified theory of fantasy football; Eat, Pray, Love; and Burning Man.
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In 1991, a Culturematic transformed television. Specifically, Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray asked, “What if we put a bunch of amateurs in a house and filmed what happens?” The result was The Real World.
The original idea was to launch a new soap opera, but this was too expensive. (MTV was looking for something to supplant the music video, which had been free.) At this point, it wasn’t clear what would work. You could put any number of things in front of the camera: grape harvests, boat races, kids playing soccer. Cheap, certainly. But entertaining?
Seven people in a house, with no training, script, makeup, or direction. It could have become an ugly, chaotic mess, difficult to look at, let alone shape into a TV show.
At this point, Bunim and Murray were in effect playing the Late Show game called “Is This Anything?” in which David Letterman and Paul Schaffer decide whether an act is “something or nothing.” Seven people stuck in a house could well be nothing. The only way was to try it and see. So Bunim and Murray set up a house in Brooklyn and turned on the cameras.
The pilot for a prime-time TV show requires celebrity actors, a union crew, many months of development, and as much as $2 million. The Real World pilot was shot with amateurs over three days on cheap Hi-8 cameras without the benefit of studio lighting or sound. Compared with prime-time TV, this was free.
When Bunim and Murray looked at the early results, they were pleased. The Real World looked like something. The early numbers were gratifying. What no one anticipated was that this little show would change the very landscape of American television. The Real World wasn’t merely something. It was revolutionary—the birth of a new genre.
In just one season, reality TV went from being a sideshow that the broadcasters considered filler to becoming one of the main events, a scheduled highlight. Within a decade, nearly 52 million people tuned in to the last night of Survivor.
Over the last two decades, reality TV has proven to be the most productive idea in the history of television, turning out hundreds of experiments, many of which survived to maturity: the Real Housewives series, Project Runway, Wipeout, Ice Road Truckers, Jon & Kate Plus 8, Jersey Shore, American Idol, Deadliest Catch, Hell’s Kitchen, Big Brother, Mob Wives, The Amazing Race, Man vs. Wild, and the latest experiment from Bunim-Murray Productions, Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Viewership numbers can be astronomical. The first episode of the fifth season of American Idol drew 35.5 million viewers. (These days, most prime-time TV shows are happy to get 12 million viewers.) Now in its 24th season, The Real World has proven a miracle of resilience. Reality TV began as a shot-in-the-dark experiment, but now it dominates cable channels and broadcast networks alike.
Some people like to sneer at reality TV. It’s not artful or crafted. Some shows have the subtlety of a peep show or a train wreck. But Culturematics don’t care. They are evolutionary experiments, brute trials, happy to discover anything that works, something that survives.
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a concept created by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty. It was designed to change the way an industry thought about itself. The aftermath of the dot-com collapse was all doom and gloom, pain and skepticism. Companies had disappeared, share value had imploded, personal wealth had taken a header, venture capital was in retreat, and Silicon Valley was in withdrawal. An entire industry was wondering what the future held.
O’Reilly and Dougherty shared that pessimism. But they could also hear something stirring. Surely, it hadn’t all been a dream. Surely, this industry had bones, structural properties that would endure. Surely, this world would right itself. O’Reilly and Dougherty believed the crash might be a sorting-out, a chance for the wheat of real enterprise to separate from the chaff of dubious start-ups.
The first question was, Was there something out there, or not? And if it was something, was it a coherent something or a dispersed something? If it was a coherent something, O’Reilly and Dougherty were going to have to give it more shape and form. First, they would have to find a name. “Web 2.0” felt right, a term robust enough to start and sustain discussion. Next, they would have to develop the concept, finding something that would make some part of the world make more sense. Their next step was a conference where they could solicit comment, provoke debate, build a consensus, and publicly launch Web 2.0, now without its training wheels. O’Reilly and Dougherty had a Culturematic mission: fire their little idea into the world, and see what happened.
Of course, O’Reilly and Dougherty could have simply announced Web 2.0 from their own publishing house. The trouble is, many things get launched this way, and most of them fail. (We only see the successes, so it’s easy to suppose that new ideas take root easily. In fact, the world is ruled by a dandelion ratio: thousands of parachutes are necessary for one to take.) Wishing will not make it so. Pronouncements usually fail.
“Web 2.0” was a strategic term. It said, “Listen. Calm yourselves. Here’s the future. It’s what you know…in a new iteration.” This same-but-different technique is reassuring in times of crisis. Here, it comforted people about the dot-com crash. “That? Oh, that was just Silicon Valley 1.0. Bound to happen.” People were accustomed to things being rocky in beta. Web 2.0 obeyed the convention that gave us Windows 5, Netscape 6, Word 7, and OS X. Naming by numbering is the way this industry reassures.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
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RELEASE THE MCCRACKEN!!!
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Unfortunately, Grant is still living in the shadow of his brother Phil.
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When I heard that joke for the first time in 6th grade about 30 years ago it was a laff riot.
One time when I heard it from some knucklehead in a bar, I told him a long story about the Irish martyr Henry Joy McCracken and how my family's name was a proud reminder of the long struggle for Irish freedom and how none of us are willing to just sit still and let someone treat it as some kind of joke.
I'd try and act like I was getting more and more upset as I'd go through this until at the end when I'd suddenly smile and shrug my shoulders.
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If I just get high, then I will have some good ideas.
What was the question?
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People with this much knowledge wanted more involvement. Fantasy football let them into the game.
My experience with fantasy sports is exactly the opposite. The people who play fantasy sports are the least knowledgeable and the least interested in the outcomes of the games. They want something to make the games more interesting. Juggling the stats and the lineups becomes its own game for the nerdy, most of whom certainly did not play the game.
They do, of course, pick up some knowledge of the actual sport while playing the fantasy version, but only so far as it improves their fantasy team -- they know the backup running backs and quarterbacks on every team in the league, but don't really know many of the plays those players run.
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I haven't seen this. I play fantasy football and my buddies are all incredibly knowledgeable. I do agree that so many people play fantasy sports that some of them have to know nothing about the game, but that's probably a minority.
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Oh, there's plenty of people playing fantasy sports who know the sport very well, but the fantasy sports universe, especially fantasy football, brings in people beyond the core fans.
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"The people who play fantasy sports are the least knowledgeable and the least interested in the outcomes of the games."
Least knowledgeable about certain aspects of the game--probably.
Fantasy players know a lot about offensive players. They know a lot about who his backup is, too. Fantasy football players in Seattle know who the Michael Turner's backup is. Old school fans didn't know that.
So, I wouldn't say they're the least knowledgeable; I'd say they're typically not as knowledgeable as fans used to be about things like formations, defense, and who's playing gunner on special teams of their hometown team.
They don't know as much about the game, and their hometown team as the old school guys, but they know more about offensive players all around the league.
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If you want to see how Morgan Spurlock lied in his "Supersize Me" movie, watch the movie "Fat Head" by Tom Naughton. I think it's available on Netflix.
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I had the same negative reaction to Spurlock in this article. I've not seen the movie you mentioned Delroy. But I assume it covers the assertion from nutritionists that Spurlock had to have eaten twice the amount of food he claimed.
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Within a couple of years, Web 2.0 was coin of the realm, the term you could use in a meeting to a chorus of nodding heads.
Holy vapid corporate anthropologic bullshit Batman. This is approaching Thomas Friedman metaphor abuse.
Speaking of another self-proclaimed deep-thinker, the fail in this is just spectacular.
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"This is an abysmal failure of free market forces to converge the end price with the cost of production."
I don't think this person has even the slightest familiarity with the terms s/he is using.
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Aside from the abysmal ignorance of economics, consider that the dweeb can't even distinguish between a simple point to point communications link versus a cellular mesh.
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They want something to make the games more interesting.
L7805CV -
Culturematic
I know made up bullshit terms when I see them, sir.
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The other thing fantasy football freed us from was the tyranny of Monday Night Football.
It used to be that if your hometown team wasn't playing on Monday night, then Monday night football didn't really matter to you.
When you're in a fantasy league, the chances of someone playing on Monday night either being on your fantasy team or on your opponent's fantasy team are very high. As a fantasy player, you end up watching and being interested in games you wouldn't care about otherwise.
As a Redskins fan, I wouldn't give a damn, normally, about Kansas City playing Tennessee. But since I have Jamaal Charles on my fantasy team, and my opponent is playing Chris Johnson, I care very much about watching the Chiefs play Tennessee.
So, playing fantasy football frees me from the tyranny of the programmers, who decide which games are on regular TV. It's hard for a fantasy football player to find a game with no fantasy relevance whatsoever. But before I started playing fantasy, I didn't give a damn about three-fourths of the games on TV.
In fact, fantasy has created a market for satellite television where there was none before. Before fantasy, there wasn't a market for people who wanted to be able to watch every single game being played every week--because people only cared about their own home teams.
Subscription satellite TV is now a huge business. Sports bars where you watch the games you want are likewise a huge industry.
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thanks
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But not much of a hearing. Friends can be relied upon to offer discouragement.Güzel Sözler - Şarkı Sözleri
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Most of these ideas keep moving. Mynet Sohbet - Sohbet
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Last week’s exertions and heroics on the field were creating the foundation of an alternate world in the ether. Film izle - Dizi izle
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Winkenbach, you are such a loser. Sohbet - Sohbet Odaları
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and who's playing gunner on special teams of their hometown team. Oyun - Mirc indir
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I do agree that so many people play fantasy sports that some of them have to know nothing about the game. Rüya Tabirleri - Yemek Tarifleri
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