In the beginning Eurovision was a complex experiment in how the new medium of TV could be utilised to create a live Television network that span across Europe. Today it is an institution and one of the most popular non-sporting broadcast events in the world.
The format is very simple. Each nation is invited to submit its best song and the other nations then rank it against the competition. So each year the winner is selected by the rest of Europe.
The interesting thing about the contest is it doesn’t attract the best songs. Indeed, apart from one or two notable exceptions (i.e. ABBA) the contest is more notable for the banality and mediocrity than the excellence of the songs on display.
What is exceptional about the contest is the production values – the staging, lighting, costumes, titles, camera work, editing and direction. For example the title and song intro sequences created last year by Red Square Productions for the Moscow Contest were truly remarkable pieces of motion graphics design.
Indeed much of the international appeal of the contest is the “Cliché” factor, the incongruous clash between high level production values and the mediocrity of the songs on offer. The medieval comic spectacle of witnessing lipstick stuck on a pig. The total package makes for magnificent musical theatre.
When I explored the idea of the Wisdom of the Crowd earlier this year I explained that when we ask a group of people to deliver a consensus answer to any given question we are actually measuring the CrowdSong in action. The CrowdSong and the Wisdom of Crowds are two separate ideas and although the monitoring the Wisdom of the Crowd can be interesting the real business is in influencing the CrowdSong.
Theoretically Eurovision isn’t about obtaining consensus; it is a competition. So it should be demonstrating the Wisdom of Crowds in action. The reality is of course the politics of Europe makes Eurovision a whole lot more than just a simple music competition. For experienced Euro observers it’s all about the music of politics rather than the quality of the music. That’s why, given the state of the Euro Zone Economy, it comes as no suprise to discover that Germany has won this year and England has come last.
So the Eurovision Song Contest is really all about measuring the CrowdSong.
So what, if anything, does the 55 years of the Eurovision Song Contest tell us about the Wisdom of the Crowds? Firstly, it suggests that the Wisdom of the Crowds is a middling concept. It doesn’t deliver innovation or game changing answers to the problem of creating great songs. It doesn’t take us down a road less travelled. It delivers the middle path, the safe road.
It does this simply because in the context of Eurovision and the newly emerging Crowd Wisdom Economy it delivers to us a consensus and quickly dismisses the exceptions that change the way we think. In this context the Wisdom of the Crowds isn’t an engine of change or of innovation. It is a platform for conservatism and inertia. It is about choosing what is least unpalatable rather than what is best.
The Wisdom of Crowds is also a political concept simply because every time you call upon a large group of people to engage in this type of decision-making process you inevitably end up with a complex adaptive system that goes in search of the middle path, the safe road, the consensus.
This then is probably why in the age of television the musically rich and diverse cultures of Europe – the cultures that once delivered to us the musical genius of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Puccini, Strauss, Tchaikovsky and countless others - now gather each year to embrace and rejoice in a celebration of the banal and the clichéd.
A designer is only as good as their reference
As an aside, this year’s title graphics for Norway Eurovision Final fell well short of last year’s efforts by Red Square Productions for the Moscow Contest . Perhaps next year Germany may find some inspiration by employing the likes of Russia’s Yulia Brodskaya or Strasbourg’s Richard Zielenkiewicz to design the title graphics and intro sequences.
Alternatively, in the true spirit of Eurovision, maybe they could open up the contest to CrowdSourcing and allow all of Europe to decide what the image of next year’s Eurovision Final should look like.
As Wired magazine has reported last year sites like crowdSpring and 99designs have successfully leveraged the myth of the Wisdom of Crowds to disrupt the graphic design industry and turn logos and illustrations into a commodity business where designers submit speculative design solutions in a “try before you” by auction.
These “Freemium” modlled “eBay for Services” sites are never going to make an impact on designers and illustrators of the caliber of Red Square, Yulia Brodskaya or Richard Zielenkiewicz but they will have an impact on the wider “bread and butter” design community.
The real concern for these design “journeymen” is these sites or only the first wave of disruption created by the Wisdom of Crowds. Just wait until somebody creates a site that allows business people to create their own long based on the wisdom of crowds.
The future of design then, as it is today in music, is all about machine manufactured electronic crowd art.
Imagine a web site where you just select the business you are in (e.g. Pizza), type in the name of the business and the software scans the whole world wide web for images before returning three or more possible design options based on the most common type of logo shape, color etc utilised by businesses in the same industry as yours. This of course is nothing more than a Web 2.0 version of the clip art collections that made Corel Draw and Powerpoint so popular in the 1990’s. But sadly I think it appears to be the future of the “bread and butter” design industry.
Posted on May 30, 2010
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