Why events and streaming are incompatible
Confinement was the opportunity for Shotgun to fundamentally rethink the nature of events. Starting from the first principles, we came back to the underlying reasons why people gather every weekend in places to see each other, dance, kiss, express a part of their identity, and potentially actualize it.
From this reflection, two conclusions quickly emerged. The first: containment or not, we must continue to build the infrastructure event creation; events have a degree of importance for our societies that an immense majority of decision-makers still do not seem to understand. The second: streaming has too quickly appeared as a lifeline in the ocean of emptiness.
The Deep Problems of Streaming
Permanent present moment vs. uniqueness of events
In a confined world, with no physical events possible, streaming appeared as a simple solution, the obvious media. As we’ve seen, it wasn’t enough. Because it contradicts what defines an event.
In stream format, the event loses its essence. The uniqueness of an event is its temporality: the excitement it generates days, weeks, even months before D-Day, the sense of urgency it provokes by its temporary nature the day it actually takes place, the idea that each note, each look, each step will be unique. The shocking announcement of the end and the lights that come back on, the desperate search for an afterparty. In short, an event is tragic in essence. It dies, disappears from the surface of Earth, and dissolves into the memories of its participants. This is not the case with streaming.
You can pause a stream; you can’t pause an event.
The stream is “eternal”: it is not constrained by time. For a viewer, it is accessible at any time of the day or night and can be replayed over and over again. In this, the stream is one of the totems of our time: the permanent now.
Yet we forget how much the media shapes the content it transmits. The media is not a mere coating; it is an active part of the process of creation and transmission. It fundamentally affects the way we perceive and receive content. Therefore, the media is crucial in the emotion it brings to the receiver. To illustrate: the same information (event, news, geopolitical tension.) will have a different impact depending on whether a person reads it via Twitter, a daily newspaper, YouTube, or via a friend who transmits the information in his own words on WhatsApp!
The media is a structural system. The message is in the media. The emotion is in the mediation.
Passivity & quality
An event is a moment of horizontality: sound diffusion, friendships, social interactions. A stream is a moment of verticality: a one-way situation. An event is lived, experienced. A stream is watched. For the person who participates in an event, you have to buy a ticket, motivate your friends, walk, take the subway or Uber there, stand and wait in line… Once inside, you dance, talk, sweat, scream, shout, bawl. For the viewer of a stream, the situation is passive. It’s in the nature of the object: individual passivity, social passivity, physical passivity. A stream is watched sitting alone.
Moreover, streamed, the event loses quality. Visual quality, sound quality, sociality. Her’s the problem: as a general rule, in the life of the viewer, whether video (Netflix) or audio (Spotify), stream is the result of a production work, which allows to benefit from a certain audio-visual quality. By projecting this level of quality onto a streamed event, the feeling of inadequate quality is increased tenfold.
Finally, the main agent without whom nothing would be possible is the artist, the DJ. For a DJ, an event is more than just a performance. It’s an experience. An individual and collective experience. The passage from the studio to the stage. From introspection and production to travel and communion. It is also a place, mythical or improvised, dark or open-air, immense or confidential. It’s a booth, turntables, a mixing desk… And above all, it’s a loop. A retroactive organic loop between the artist, the sound, and the audience. All these specificities are extremely hard to find on the stream. The stream is, first and foremost, a performance, a remote concert.
The single-stream empties the event of its uniqueness, sociability, and quality. The causes are multiple and can be summed up as follows: the media imposes its forms on the content.
However, COVID has triggered in a rush towards streaming. At Shotgun, we decided to go back to the first principles of events to try to build something new.
Back to the first principles of event management to build a solution
In a previous paper in the series Shotgun vs. COVID, I describe our vision of the event industry in details, starting from the triptych of what makes events unique: temporality, materiality, sociability.
Based on this, we have decided to work on four main axes to create a new event creation structure:
> Solving the problem of temporal uniqueness, in particular, to recover the excitement of temporality
> Solving the problem of spatial unity: visually, mentally, emotionally
> Trying to materialize or even increase tenfold the intensity of interactions, emotions, and intentions characteristic of festive events
> Allowing multiple identities and behaviors to express themselves
Temporal uniqueness: first step and trigger
Let’s remember that an event is temporary in essence. A constraint of time that generates this singular excitement. A stream that doesn’t have a date or precise time slot and to which one has access in replay ad Vitam aeternam will never be able to generate a single drop of sweat of excitement.
Therefore, the first challenge is to give a temporal anchor to the event: a specific day, a start time, and thus allow users to regain the excitement of waiting.
The second challenge is to allow us to rediscover the enjoyment of that precise moment, linked to the simple fact that the event has an end; it is temporary. This condensed sample of life that we talk about in the previous paper.
To go through with this temporary logic, the event must leave no other trace than the memories of its participants: no chat history, no video history. What happens on Shotgun, stays on Shotgun.
Returning to the fundamental principle of the temporality of an event consists of simply recreating online what makes the singularity of a real event: a start time, an end time between the two. You have to be there to see it!
In other words, in the same way that Snapchat in its time put back the impulsive, instantaneous aspect of communication at the heart of social networks with stories, short messages, it is for us to put back the excitement, to allow a vital momentum that the eternal stream does not allow.
Maybe we need to do to the stream what Snapchat did to social networks in its time. Put the excitement back into the temporary. The temporary allows the vital rush that the eternal flow does not. Snapchat allowed the communicative impulse that a Facebook inhibited.
Disdancing, Shotgun’s virtual event platform, was born out of this desire to recreate the instantaneous, the singular, a unique and new experience.
Spatial & Spiritual Unity
It was first explained that spatial unity is one of the fundamental elements of an event. An event is a place. There are the outside and the inside. Between the two is the door. Inside, the place is governed by a series of more or less explicit values and behaviors. The link is, therefore, as much physical as it is spiritual.
One of Shotgun features that our users love the most is the one that allows a staff member, or bouncer, to “tear” a ticket directly via the application by a simple swipe of a finger on the screen of the participant’s phone. This is anything but random. Access to the event is a special moment that is not just another step forward in the waiting line. It is a symbolic moment. The moment of acceptance.
The place represents the temporary community one is about to join. The door represents the border. The bouncer represents the guardian of this intimate order. A stream, one enters (and leaves) it like in a mill. Without asking permission. Without warning when you leave. All exit is temporary!
So how do we recreate a model of spatial unity online? How can we create a material emotion, the feeling of entering a place? This is the second major challenge for Disdancing.
We started with simple elements and formalized four main axes.
First axis: a place is an entity, a unique space. We have therefore chosen to make Disdancing an exclusive content platform and to refrain from cross-posting. The only way to live the experience is to be in a unique place of diffusion and experimentation.
Second axis: if a stream can accommodate hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers, we decided to give Disdancing a new dimension of hardware capacity, by setting up a real viewer gauge.
The third axis, fundamental element: demarcation, entry, and exit. This moment of acceptance is so crucial between the organizers of the event and its public. We have thus replaced the Shotgun ticket swipe function with a digital bouncer that lets the user enter. The objective is to make everyone feel that they are entering a place that is not only material but spiritual, this famous order, horizontal for sure, but still an order.
The fourth axis finally: the place is a labyrinth. Each space has its function. From the smoky hall to the private dance rooms, from the wall of fame to the bar, from the public room to the toilets whereas in any club toilet, you can draw on the walls — each space allows the participants to live the experience through a different prism, to express themselves through various forms: voice, writing, emojis, drawings, and of course dance.
Other thoughts…
It has been said before that by welcoming a definite and temporary community, a place goes beyond its material condition to become something more substantial, something spiritual. A moral space with predefined values and behaviors. In this framework, it could be relevant to allow an organizer to define his space, to “protect” his place. This could take the form of a questionnaire that must be filled in to enter the event (personality, values, tastes); or, just in the form of a charter, firmly committing each user.
Finally, several organizers keep the address of the location of their secret event until the last day, sometimes the last hour. Complex to find, hard to achieve, the freedom that the event allows once the place is penetrated is deserved, and therefore savored to the extreme. The tribulations of the secret place multiply the pleasure tenfold, putting the feeling of freedom in turmoil.
How can we regain that feeling of freedom, of secrecy, of rave, of a free party? Why not by creating online secret raves: hard to find on the site because they are hidden, of course not registered (replay, chat.) so 100% unique, protected by a password not divulged to the general public. You can even imagine creating an online secret warehouse on the blockchain. But I’m getting a bit carried away.
A stream is a multi-dimensional object. The spatial unity is shattered. The flow is an open puzzle. The event is a closed maze.
Emotional materialization
The “100% digital” forced by containment has distorted social interactions in their diversity, frequency, and intensity.
The main goal of many young partygoers every weekend is to experience as much interaction as possible during their evening(s) — and often during their days. The Covidien stream has violently shattered this desire.
Is it possible to materialize such intense emotions, to allow their intensity to express itself?
It is without having answered this question yet that we have thought about Disdancing as an extension of the body in that it allows us to interact and commune with those around us. It is not a social “network”; it is a social “body” that tries to sublimate distance.
Disdancing attempts to translate and multiply tenfold the interactions that make up the festive social space.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of what Disdancing currently allows:
· dancing, alone, with friends, with the audience, in a group
· being alone but together #introverted: participating in the social experience, communing, without being forced into direct interaction
· show love: hugging friends, strangers, kissing, making high fives
· express a mood without talking
· feel the event’s emotional thermometer
· express oneself: say, write, draw what comes to mind