OPEN

* Corrected *

Dontcha just love synchronicity? There’s me wondering about young people and online privacy and reputation and meanwhile Matt Locke and the gang at Channel 4 are launching new cross-platform programming, including social spaces and online games, that are all about just that, says Kevin Anderson:

One of Channel 4’s game will be called Ministry, an online, networked ARG that challenges teens to think about online privacy and identity and how they apply to their lives. How do you develop trust with people you can’t see? Do you think about the information that you are posting online when it “remains persistent and public”? Those are issues that everyone, not just teens, should be thinking about.

The coverage of Channel 4’s slate of educational programming is well worth a read. What’s going on over there is bold and exciting and as it plays out will help us understand not just how education but how TV and media will evolve in the the super-complexity of the 21st century’s attention markets.

Channel 4’s team has begun with the facts, and hasn’t hid from them: teens aren’t watching their education programmes. Why? They’re all online. What to do? Create programming that will reach them where they are.

Kevin Anderson picks up on a quote from Matt that gets straight to the strategic heart of how media organisations should be thinking about 360-degree commissioning, total TV, trans-media or however you’d like to describe this new way of thinking about how programming gets made:

Cross platform commissioning is not about asking: Is it tele or is it web? But where is the audience? We have to commission for our audience wherever they are.

Photo: Matt Locke telling production companies how it is… 

And I utterly empathise with the C4 team when Kevin points out that:

they are moving into new areas, and they don’t have established models to use. Not everything will be a raging success, but they have a three to four year plan that will incorporate feedback from the projects and teens uptake and participation.

I feel exactly the same about marketing and communicating inside networks. You have to get engaged now without certainties beyond an understanding of the fundamentals and a strong set of principles about how to behave. The models, the successes, to coin a phrase, will be emergent.

The thing about networks is that you can’t just thing about them as another channel – that’s missing the challenge and the opportunity completely. We need to innovate and create new mental and practice models for what is a completely new media environment.

The only sane thing to do is to follow the attention. Not the eyeballs, not the money, the attention: of individuals, of communities as they traverse and take up (often nomadic) residence in the networks.

Matt’s told me about these projects before, but reading about people’s perspectives on them now they are beginning to see the light of day I have to once more shout three hurrahs for determined vision of him, Alice WalkerTaylor , Janey Walker and everyone else in that team that is literally being brave enough to reinvent TV for the way the world is now.

Also good reading and listening:

• Jemima Kiss’s coverage on the Guardian
• Ewan McIntosh, C4 Education board member: love his headline: Do it first. Make Trouble. Inspire Change.
• Matt Locke explains C4’s cross-platform strategy to production companies – challenging stuff.
• Channel 4 Education Briefing – laying out how C4 education sees the world it is living in and what it wants to do about it.