Who are the Digital Assassins…?
As a We Media Fellow or a ‘”WE-J”, I was asked to blog around today’s 3:10 pm session, provocatively titled: Meet the Digital Assassins. Having just arrived at the BBC and still slightly jetlagged from my flight from New York, I decided to ask what exactly a Digital Assassin is before blogging about it. What in fact are these ?Åssassins expected to talk about, i wondered. Embarrassed at my lack of knowledge, I turned to one of the panel participants and inquired why they had agreed to speak as a Digital Assassin, and what exactly that means to them. The response completely took me by surprise: ” I have no idea what it means. I simply received an email inviting me to speak and here I am”. So I pushed, probing for some deeper meaning of what the panel is all about; I didn’t get far; the panelist reiterated my suspicion, he has no clue. Strangely, I received a similar response from one of the WE Media Center staffers…Now here I sit, typing away, trying to figure out who’s who and what’s what. If the conference staffers and the panelists don’t know, who does? I daintily did a quick search on the net – Google would know, they know everything! Sure enough, the first item that came up can be found here posted from the ‘fringe’. Actually, if you look at the author, you’ll notice that he is in fact a BBC employee. Since when is the BBC considered the fringe? From the little that I’ve seen of the WE Media Conference so far, it seems that we need to practice, not just preach the idea of critical thinking, where each of us, whether panelist, blogger or audience member, take responsability for shaping this conference, as opposed to letting the conference shape us.
Below are the main points made by the 30 Digital Assassins, each invited to sit at a table with a group of traditional media representatives. :
-who are these Digital Assassins? Who do they trust?
Answer: they are consumers who represent a psychographic, a group of people, across several demographics that are more likely to get news from websites and more likely to write blogs than read them.
– Are they assassins or are they partners?
Table 27 Richard Harris is asked the following:
‘”Tell us about your media day, someone from the corporate world wants to know. “‘My homepage is the BBC and it allows me to get an idea of what is going on in the world but it is the syndication browsers that give me the details of the world that I care about, I work from home; I haven’t read a paper for the last 10 years; I re-feed the news I find relevant through my site.”
Table 22 Mike Ryan talks about his favorite mode of information delivery
Lillianne, Why do they call you a Digital Assassin?
“I have no idea- saw a posting and was curious”:
Mike watches the morning news on his hand-held device as opposed to his computer or his television. He likes U-Tube. He doesn’t watch TV at all in fact.
Table 23 Neil Roberts
Neil says: “I tend to go to a blog that builds up a reputation and go with it, like word of mouth. It’s far more effective than spam. I am a programmer; I have quick breaks so I like to scan news/info aggregators on the net.”
Neil wants to know whether the members of the mainstream media at the table isn’t relevant- he wants to know what they think about the way he experiences media. So, I asked Peter, also at the table. Peter has worked in the wired news buisness for 16 years now : “Your media usage is quite utilitarian as opposed to general’
“How do you decide what gets reported”, Neil wants to know of Neil’s company policy. “‘Our clients decide'”. responds Peter. Ah, that brings me to the following question, are we talking about a group of Digital Assassins or simply a group of Digital Dissidents?
TAG: wemedia
Previous Comments
I think the term “Digital Assassin” is a metaphor for what’s going on in media today. Like any metaphor, it takes a little thinking to be able to express clearly what the metaphor means. Pehaps Juliet didn’t get the answers she was looking for because people were trying to follow a pretty packed conference program and didn’t want to take the time to give a thoughtful answer. Since she obviously was the one person who WAS thinking about it, it’s too bad she didn’t offer her own thoughts of what it means. To me, a “Digital Assassin” is someone who lives in the digital world, embracing innovation, experimenting with new content forms and delivery, and celebrating the connectivity to millions of viewpoints everywhere. They are “assassins” in that they are at the vanguard of change in the mediascape that’s killing, if you will, old media, old business models, old thinking. I hope others will join me here and give their understanding of what the term means.
The whole point of being a ‘digital assassin’ is that you shouldn’t be taken seriously. Hence.
My new blog gets around 100 unique visitors a day, and around five times as many hits (excluding search engines). This has being growing day by day since I launched the site a week or so ago. At least a 1/3 of people have been coming back. Not bad for a blog with no big names and no money behind it.
Clearly people don’t mind me extolling the virtues of not being taken seriously because they wouldn’t keep coming back.
As one of the Assassins, I agree with Graham that the whole thing was a bit ill thought out. We received a scanty brief in advance, little more before we were ushered in and in the 20 minutes allocated to the “conversation” no real time to establish a dialogue. My experience was a quick-fire round of questions I had no time to consider and had to answer off the cuff (let alone respond to with thoughtful questions of my own). It was an interesting idea, but perhaps too gimmicky in its implementation – I’m not sure what the conference delegates were expecting from it, but I doubt it was quite what they got.
I agree with Gloria Pan… I thought the same idea of a metaphor… Digital Assasins… I would say slowly killing old media.
I think it’s rather a peyorative adjective… and I think it’s sad that the panelists didn’t know what they were there for… at least they could have tried to explain if they agreed or not with this idea of being called assasins…
I’m proud of all the people who try to follow up with new tech
onolgies and adapt the way of thinking and working to these.
If this is being assasins…. OK… in every change there’s people needed to start!
Today was a let-down and this session was the worst of it. Congrats to the BBC for trying to come up with something different (we need more experiments, but this one frankly didn’t work). To quote the increasingly annoying nomeclature of the day, how are we supposed to decode this? A sub-conscious attempt at brand assasination? We’ve managed to wear out the term “conversation” through repetition and we’re only half-way through. A plastic presenter reading tired jokes off his clipboard and a bunch of new media early-adopters plonked in our midst “to make conversation” does not make for meaningful engagement. Ill-timed and a cringeworthy attempt at hip-ness. Perhaps if these “assassins” *groan* represented some facet of YOUTH, CULTURE, anything not already represented at the forum it may have been more meaningful.
My assasin (same table as Graham above) spent the entire time relaying how much time he spends downloading stuff, and which technologies he uses (iPod, bit torrent, etc). He was pretty excited about it! He didn’t ask us questions at all, he was a man on a mission to unload to us all of the ways he spends time online.
What’s fascinating to me is that I spent time this morning prior to today’s start speaking with two BBC people who were very excited about the Digital Assasin segment. They learned a lot of information about how technology is used and how content is appropriated. I think that depending on where you are on the new media continuum, you will have gotten a different perspective from the discussion.
The digital assassins programme was something which the BBC have been invested in for about 2 years, and was intended as a method of informing BBC staff at all levels of emerging technologies and the ‘fringe’ public of those technologies use.
It was a very succesful program within the BBC as more time was allocated in the sessions held internally, and is in principle an excellent idea; bringing those citizens who are actively creating and using new technologies to bypass ‘old media’ – generally this focusses on new ways of consuming media; bittorent,gnutella/limewire,DRM circumvention,time lapse TV and recording habits (thereby circumventing ad models) – thoroughly interesting and hard to find data really.
I was invited to attend wemedia as a digital assassin but unfortunately couldn’t make it; my experience with the program through the last two years was interesting so I am dissapointed that attendees weren’t able to get much out of it.
Being one of the ‘assassins’ I have to agree with the comments about the lack f briefing and also clarity about the role. That said I did get a lot out of the experience and this was due to the individuals on the table I was allocated being interested, polite and curious.
I was thankful for the opportunity and maybe on this occasion the experiment didn’t work but you got to break some eggs to make an omelette 🙂
I was surpised with my time with our digital assassin who was very good at telling me stuff, but didn’t think to ask me anything. So much for conversation. All a bit ill thought out and a bit daft.