social television

SOCIAL TV: Fiction is seducing Fact, Reality is becoming a Dream

The blurring of author + audience: Whose story is it?

LIVING STORIES: Living stories are upon us. Imagine a cinema or films full of viewers/participants guiding a film’s course. Imagine a celebrity submitting to his/her fan’s socially communicated desires and vice versa. Imagine the fan-guided star, the film packed with alternate directions that viewers can guide via a mobile app. We are in the age of choose your own adventure sensibility and the tech to support it is here.

How is this trotted out in hard cold steps? How can I apply the possibility above NOW?

1. READ CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE: Go buy a choose your own adventure book: http://amzn.to/the_cave_of_time

2. WRITE: Write out a series of possibilities for your life. That’s with a pen and a piece of paper OR on your computer.

3. A NETWORK OF IDENTITIES: Create a network of identities in the social web, each based around one of these possibilities.

a. Name each possibility

b. Set up a Twitter account for each name

c. Aggregate key influencers related to that name, that concept. Use Listorious to do this. Follow ALL of these influencers and study who they follow. Use Research.ly to gain insight into what is trending and other useful information from your focused Interest Graph.

d. Create a FB account for this name. Populate the account with images, video, text and links derived from the focused Twitter account.

e. Schedule 60 days of tweets using SocialOomph.

f. Now go into Quora and ask questions that arise for you related to this identity. Source tweets, blog posts, image searches, video creation, music selection and other content from answers to these questions.

g. Now go into YouTube via a Gmail account set up for a specific identity and create a branded account. Create channels of content full of favorited videos. Create videos of your own where you narrate stories related to a series of images or a live journey you take (POV).

h. Now go to Flickr via Yahoo and create a series of Sets or Galleries full of images associated with this identity.

i. If you are wanting to really expand, go to KnowEm and populate hundreds of properties with various types of content.

4. CURATION: By this time, you have curated a body of resources and individuals/groups around these identities. And you have produced your own content based upon your observation and initial participation in those blended graphs of Interest and Social connection. The content is all source material for your choose your own adventure social media/socialTV project.
More on curation.

5. Fund it.

A NEW LIFE: A movie IS a community waiting live that story. In the past, one would go to a movie, watch it and walk out with something within. But now when we walk into a cinema, we have the potential to walk into a completely new life…into something that is done vs. watched. Movies can now be an active experience for the user and the community. And truly life-changing.

CASTING OFF FLESH: Consider what Ibn Sina Avicenna, a Persian philosopher-scientist who lived between 980 and 1037 A.D, wrote:

“These bodily members are, as it were, no more than garments; which, because they have been attached to us for a long time, we think are us, or parts of us [and] the cause of this is the long period of adherence: we are accustomed to remove clothes and to throw them down, which we are entirely unaccustomed to do with our bodily members.”

Consider that through social networks, apps, PCs and mobile devices, we are casting off our bodily limbs, and beginning to wear our spirits.