To help guide our Super Studio project, we were give three bounding terms: Existence Value, Conversation and Stickiness. Below are our definitions of each of these terms.
Existence Value.
Existence value describes the value placed on the basic existence of a particular location or physical object. Philosophically, existence value distinguishes ontology, of simply ‘being’, from more teleological, purpose-driven characteristics: e.g., monetary, political, sentimental or historical.
The concept was first used by pro-environmentalists (Krutilla, “Conservation
Reconsidered”, 1967) to argue that the value of an environment and the natural resources it provides are not necessarily fungible commodities. By arguing that locations, such as the Alaskan wildlife refuge, held a unique and intrinsic value simply through existence, arguments could be made to countervail the monetary benefits of extracting oil and natural gas. Environmental arguments that leverage existence value will typically ask the question, “How would you feel if a place was polluted or destroyed, even though you will never go there?”
Indeed, in both its definition and traditional use, existence value describes the value we put on places that we are aware of, but which we neither have, nor likely ever will encounter physically—places such as Antarctica or the International Space Station. However, with the increasing reach of real-time media into our lives, we can now access ‘live’ visions of these unreachable locations with facility that has never been possible before. Further, as the actions and activities of others in our own society are broadcast, real-time media content causes us to pause and consider the existence of even the quotidian world around us.
In this way, we found existence value to be a crucial concept to the critical evaluation of the various scenes, streets, environments and people that web cameras and real-time data feeds can provide. Our research focused on the ways interaction with real- time content might function as a catalyst for the perceptions and values of our participant families.
Conversation.
Conversation has been studied in many disciplines and towards many objectives: in applied linguistics, both as an emergent grammar (Hopper 1987), in certain theories of speech acts (Bahktin 1986; Austin 1955; Searle 1969) and for its role in the co-construction of meaning (Goodwin 2006, 2003). In cultural studies, conversation is studied as an ideological construct that establishes positions of power (Hawes 1999; Nietzsche 1962; Foucault and Deluze 1972). Finally, conversation has been examined for its unique rhetorical styles of colloquial, deliberative and interpersonal discourse within various public spheres (Habermas 1962; Hauser 1999; Roberts-Miller 2004; Flower 2003).
Situating various studies of discourse within the context of our research, we were interested in the dynamics of conversation unique to domestic sphere and among family members. Further, we were interested in how real-time media content may alter or affect these dynamics. In this way, our research continued many academic conversations that consider media’s influence on family discourse. Celeste Condit (1989) suggests that the ability of audiences to shape their own readings is seriously constrained by a variety of factors in any given rhetorical situation, including the audience dynamics of families. She suggests that the discussions that occur among audience members before, during and after an interaction with media have a measurable and crucial impact on the understandings and perceptions of the media message. (Schwartz 2004; Subrahmanyam, Kraut, et al. 2000) emphasize the effects of media upon pre-teens and children, and the responsibility of families to mitigate certain deleterious effects of media technologies while still embracing the positive aspects. Finally, Sparks (2001) suggests that mass media engender new kinds of conversational atmospheres across social groups. Sparks is critical of the comfort and disconnection people find today in mass media and cautions that what people really need are close social support systems.
Past research of conversation and discourse guides our research, and forms the basis of hypotheses that we have formed concerning new roles of media in shaping family conversations. As we looked to real-time media content, we became interested in how past understandings of our discursive relationships with media may take new shapes. As content loses its narrative quality, will our conversations become an even more important and productive part of the media message? Further, does real-time media foster conversation that creates stronger social relationships? Such investigations may reveal ways that real-time content can create family conversational atmospheres that function in quite different ways from television or the Internet.
Stickiness.
Our research defined the concept of stickiness as the ability of content (objects, texts, speech, etc.) to uncannily engage and captivate an individual at moment of interaction, and then also to remain, or ’stick’, in an individual’s memory over time.
Stickiness was originally used as a term from socio-economics, describing effects and conditions that cause real-life prices resist theoretical market forces. According to the Economist, “Prices change only when the cost of leaving them unchanged exceeds the expense of adjusting them. In financial markets, prices move all the time…In other industries, small disequilibria in, say, the pricing of hotel rooms will not make much difference [in people's choices]. So hotel prices are often sticky.” While stickiness often occurs in times of recession, it also refers to the influence of other social factors-loyalty, convenience, tradition, ignorance, etc.-which tend to supercede ’supply and demand’ as the determining factor of the number of goods sold at a certain price.
Understanding what makes certain industries, ideas and social selections more ’sticky’, especially despite more rational financial principles, has been of great interest in recent years to e-marketers who desire to keep visitors at their websites as long as possible. For marketers, ‘sticky content’ refers to content that encourages longer website visits, as well as repeat visits over time. The idea is that a “sticky” website will be interesting and engaging enough that it obviates the need for costly rebates, discounts and other ‘calls to action’. Examples of successful ’sticky content’ (Nemzow 2005) include participatory activities (chat rooms and forums), personalized content (horoscopes, widgets) and entertainment (games and trivia).
Our research from our first term allowed us to study the role of stickiness in relation to real-time web cams and data feeds that broadcast unscripted content throughout the day. Are such real-time feeds more, or less, sticky. That is, are they ‘captivating and engaging’? If so, which ones, and most importantly, why? How does real-time media change our understandings of ‘engaging’? Does unscripted, non-narrative media perhaps allow for deeper, more memorable relationship with the content? Our research from first term allowed us to better understand what qualities of real-time media are sticky, and further, how past theoretical conceptions of stickiness change in the context of real-time media.
