The right thing is the wrong thing to do – Narrative strategies for the attention economy

The money, according to the technology writer Kevin Kelly (2017), in a networked economy does not follow the path of digital products, ‘rather it follows the path of attention’. Increasingly we can see the disruption of television production and distribution not just as the result of a corporate strategy (Christensen et al. 2015) but as an outcome in relation to a changing model of audience engagement. The first half of this paper will look at the long tail strategy adopted by media networks such as HBO and Netflix to produce programmes, such as Breaking Bad and House of Cards, which gave filmmakers the creative freedom to build audiences over several seasons. These programmes are products of what many are calling television’s third golden age (Spacey 2013, Landau 2016, McDonald 2016,) We may therefore wish not only to identify formal characteristics in their narration (McCormick, 2016) but also how the visual attention of their dedicated audiences differs (Smith & Nako, 2013)

Along with the new narrative experiences expressed through these programmes are a new set of expectations that commissioning editors are beginning to place on filmmakers (Woolcock, 2016). Binge viewing, viewer-to-viewer engagement, the rise of influencers and the decline of the critic are a few of the new patterns of spectatorship to have emerged worldwide in recent years. In the second half of this paper I will look at what tactics some filmmakers employ in the face of these expectations and the styles of filmmaking that appropriate and transform technological demand within the attention economy.