How we mocked him, and many of us still do.
But he was right, and the irony is his delineation exposed the very thing he was alluding to in talking to an audience.
The Johari connundrum: what you think you know, but don't know is as old as philosophy.
So why am I kicking it around all of a sudden? On Wednesday I deliver a lecture on Online video and as I sit in front of another powerpoint window I'm sighing, enormously I might add.
There are things I know and there are things I don't know, and the bits I know I don't know, well they're pretty big as well. But overall given my experience in video and the five years reading more books than the average reader for my Doctorate, I'm confident of what I know will be of some use.
Online video is an interesting Johari/ Rumsfeld problem.
What's the difference between online video and offline? At this point you'll match what most people know about it being a lean forward affair and that millions of video go online every hour.
Then the anecdotes start.
But there is a more powerful and simpler answer. All video is designed for you to watch. So if you could figure out how people watch, what they watch and how you go about producing something people ideally will watch, you've got it made.
This in fact is the premise in an ideas sort of way Freakanomics, except that cognitivism got there before Feakanomics.
Now for perhaps a known unknown. All video has a sweep spot. All video attempts to connect to your brain with an invisible umbilical chord and raise those dopamine levels, whether for pleasure, fear intrigue etc.
How it does so is based on cognitive behaviour which predates video. When you watch a play, with the right ambience, stage setting, actor projecting their voice and so on, you'll either engage or battle with bouts of abstruseness. You know, the bits where you pause and look around and think about the woman or man in the forth row.
Back to knowns. In wanting to understand online video, I could do that Ten things you need to know about online video. This works to a degree, but is so prescriptive that its like applying a box of plasters to every different type of injury you're likely to encounter.
So what should I do instead? I'll tell you later today... here in fact.
David Dunkley Gyimah uses art, economics and storytelling to explain things :)
