Jimmy Wales to Hollywood: You’re Doomed (And Not Because of Piracy)

[Adrean]

GENEVA, Switzerland — Jimmy Wales has a message for Hollywood: You’re doomed, it won’t be piracy that kills you, and nobody will care.

The Wikipedia founder, delivering a keynote address at the Internet Society’s INET convention in Geneva, predicted that Hollywood will likely share the same fate as Encyclopedia Britannica, which shut down its print operation this year after selling just 3,000 copies last year.

“Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice,” Wales said. But it won’t be Wikipedia (or Encarta) that kills the moviemaking industry: ”Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica,” he said.

Wales hedged by saying predictions are easy — and he’s usually wrong. But he looks at a generation of kids growing up in a world of video and mastering editing software at a young age. His own 12-year-old daughter, Wales said, is already adept at iMovie and won a local award for a short film she made.

And just as Wikipedia has show that collaboration on the web is possible (despite the messiness, flame wars and turf battles found on Wikipedia Talk pages), the new generation will find ways to collaborate online to create movies to entertain themselves and their friends.

And, Wales says, they’ll do that with impressive special effects, CGI and even remote actors.

But telling a story and building a feature-length film collaboratively is much different and much harder than collectively adding verifiable facts to a Wikipedia entry. So it’s unlikely that Hollywood’s going to pay much attention to Wales’ prognostication. Which means if the next generation turns out to find away to creating the next Titanic on a $5,000 budget, Hollywood won’t even see the blow coming.

:view:Original Article: Wired