Nokia's circular thinking

Continuing its transformation from handset giant to multimedia power, Nokia dominated headlines throughout the week, announcing in quick succession its new Comes With Music download program, its new web services deal with Telecom Italia, its acquisition of web services provider Avvenu and even a new device, the Nokia 6263. But most intriguing is Nokia's prediction that within five years time, as much as a quarter of all entertainment will originate from consumers' peer circles instead of traditional media outlets. Calling this segment of the user-generated content phenomenon "circular entertainment"--i.e. media created, edited and shared within a consumer's extended network of family and friends--Nokia argues that current trends like social networking, mobile IM and multiplayer gaming anticipate an explosion of collaborative social media.

"We think it will work something like this: Someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend, that friend takes that footage and adds an MP3 file--the soundtrack of the evening--then passes it to another friend. That friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend and so on," Nokia vice president of multimedia Mark Selby said in a prepared statement. "The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group's entertainment."

There's nothing intrinsically new about the circular entertainment phenomenon, as anyone who's ever endured their friends' vacation photos can tell you. From cave drawings forward, cultures have used the tools at their disposal to document and share their lives and times--digital technologies have simply afforded us the platform to distribute our photos, e-mails and video clips worldwide, as well as enabling others to expand and comment on them. But if anything, Nokia's forecast seems a bit conservative--I'd wager most of us already derive a significant chunk of our daily entertainment intake from personal e-mails and text messages, Facebook interaction, YouTube clips and so on, especially given the preponderance of 60-hour workweeks, the abundance of networked devices and the scarcity of compelling pop music, movies and TV series. 

The problem is determining exactly what constitutes "entertainment," a concept so subjective and ambiguous that definitions are pointless. Are all messages entertainment? All photos? Moreover, Nokia's proposition that traditional, mass-market entertainment and user-generated, circular entertainment are two distinct strains seems fundamentally flawed--each has informed and shaped the other since the dawn of pop culture. If anything, the lines between professional and amateur content are blurrier than ever before--credit (or blame) mash-ups, reality TV and MySpace for that. Given how much content creation, consumption and distribution has changed in the last five years, it's impossible to imagine how much further it will evolve in the next five. As marketing conceits go, "circular entertainment" has a nice ring to it, but marketing is all it is. - Jason