Mark Lyn­der­say

It was run­ning late, this fi­nal sem­i­nar of the sec­ond day of dis­cus­sions about Car­ni­val two weeks ago at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts, in Port-of-Spain. It was hard not to fid­get on the aw­ful fold­ing chair in this in­creas­ing­ly dark and emp­ty room wait­ing on a group of me­dia prac­ti­tion­ers, pro­duc­ers, per­form­ers and the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of three lo­cal web sites to wrap their heads around the idea of con­tent. Why un­der­stand­ing what con­tent means, why it's im­por­tant in a wired world and why it's crit­i­cal to have a plan to lever­age it to the ad­van­tage of the cre­ative com­mu­ni­ty that pro­duces it should elude this em­i­nent group so de­ci­sive­ly was ab­solute­ly con­fus­ing.

Much of the dis­cus­sion was adamant­ly off top­ic, re­hash­ing is­sues to do with lo­cal mu­sic and Car­ni­val al­ready aired dur­ing the two days of dis­cus­sions on the top­ic This Busi­ness of Car­ni­val. At one point O'Bri­an Haynes tried game­ly to pull the top­ic back on track, but he end­ed up in a mud­dle about mi­cro and macro op­por­tu­ni­ties that proved woe­ful­ly short on specifics or clar­i­ty about what, ex­act­ly, he was talk­ing about. Some­where ear­ly on, Pe­ter C Lewis of Syn­er­gy made the large­ly un­sub­stan­ti­at­ed state­ment that the ma­jor­i­ty of artistes were be­ing signed to­day be­cause of YouTube. Lor­raine O'Con­nor lament­ed that the ma­jor­i­ty of mu­sic that comes to her Trinidad­Tunes.com on­line mu­sic ven­ture was sub­stan­dard. Josanne Lennard not­ed that the big broad­cast busi­ness­es had been slow to adapt to a chang­ing game.

By this time, the room, nev­er host to more than around 70 peo­ple, had dwin­dled to half that and they were drib­bling out the door as the dis­cus­sion me­an­dered. Hav­ing al­ready lament­ed the ab­sence of any kind of struc­ture to this Car­ni­val busi­ness sem­i­nar that might have cham­pi­oned the idea of pro­pos­als over lamen­ta­tions and still ir­ri­tat­ed by the lost op­por­tu­ni­ties in a sem­i­nar ti­tled Con­tent is King–Tra­di­tion­al Me­dia & New Me­dia, I am moved to say here what I could not there, over­come as I was by an­noy­ance. To be­gin, then, con­tent is the point, not just metaphor­ic roy­al­ty. No­body tunes in to ra­dio or tele­vi­sion or picks up a pa­per to en­joy the ad­ver­tis­ing. No­body at­tends a par­ty or con­cert to look at the ad­ver­tis­ing bunting or to get a brand­ed rag to wave. They at­tend for the con­tent, which is not lim­it­ed to the mu­sic or the words or the de­sign of the en­vi­ron­ment. Au­di­ences are at­tract­ed to con­tent which is am­pli­fied by its con­text. A so­ca hit, for in­stance, be­comes dif­fer­ent con­tent at mid­night in a par­ty, at mid­day on the ra­dio and in a video on YouTube. Mor­phed by its con­text, the same song be­comes a dif­fer­ent ex­pe­ri­ence, rel­ished and re­mem­bered in dif­fer­ent ways.

The key that might have un­locked the col­lec­tive knowl­edge at that pan­el dis­cus­sion might have been an ac­knowl­edge­ment that each of the par­tic­i­pants rep­re­sent­ed a facet of con­tent use, not its fi­nal des­ti­na­tion, and the an­swers were to be found in lever­aged col­lab­o­ra­tion among them in the ser­vice of artistes. If these talks ever move for­ward to the oft ref­er­enced "au­thor­i­ties" to take de­ter­mined­ly un­spec­i­fied "ac­tion" then the ac­tion on con­tent must be cen­tred on artist em­pow­er­ment and coach­ing on the many spokes of op­por­tu­ni­ty that can ra­di­ate from the cre­ations of lo­cal artistes. Con­tent providers are in a unique po­si­tion to par­lay their in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty in­to in­come in an In­ter­net-en­abled world, but no­body seems to be pay­ing at­ten­tion to the need for cre­ators to be­gin lac­ing up their togs to take their own prof­itable run in new me­dia.