Jesse Hirsh

Metaviews.ca is currently setting up a new project: The Academy of the Impossible, located at 231 Wallace Ave. in the Junction Triangle neighbourhood of Toronto’s downtown west end. It will partly serve as a location for our salons and seminars along with all facets of our daily operations.

The setup for the Academy is a relatively novel one. As an open source social enterprise, it will integrate both for-profit and non-profit enterprises, along with providing a physical touchpoint for our clients and broader community. This will include bringing to life many online ideas that often end up remaining hypothetical — we want to make them feel possible.

Since consumers are also taking on the role of producers, the Metaviews programming at the Academy will reflect that inevitability, with events designed to empower the human relationship with technology. During this era of disruption for business, media and politics, our infinite series of “Hacking Reality” events will explore all forms of self-expression, from mobile apps and videogames to improv comedy and public speaking.

The events for AOTI members and guests will be concurrent with our continued subscriber efforts throughout the week. Now, with a permanent space, we expect to exponentially expand the insights we can share with clients. But we covered a fair bit of ground on the way there:

• How gadgets are marketed during the holiday season even if they’re about to become replaced by new models

• Shopping apps designed to follow people around the mall, measure window shopping and offer a better deal via Amazon

• YouTube’s evolution from a cat video free-for-all to a more Hollywood-friendly platform based on subscription feeds

• Changes to Facebook, Twitter and Google in the race to build social media market share — possibly at the expense of user trust

• Compliments and criticism for Open Government initiatives in Ottawa including reaction to the official social media guidelines

• The hopes and hypes of 2011 including the evolution of Anonymous, theories of Gamification and digital currency alternatives

Also, on deck for 2012, our second year-long major research project will focus on “The Future of Health” — which will include recurring discussions in our seminars and salons.

Please see the Metaviews.ca website for more information on the subscription package. And follow The Academy of the Impossible for news about all its programming.

Fall 2011 has been a fun time developing of Metaviews. While keeping tabs on the disruption of fields from advertising to academia, we have continued to develop our own projects, which has included extending our presence beyond Toronto.

A pair of salon events in Ottawa have focused on the challenges involved in the transformation to Open Government, which drew interest from all areas of the bureaucracy, as developing a more citizen-friendly approach has been pledged by the federal government.

Similar challenges are being faced by the non-profit sector as it attempts to retool its messaging for the social media age. The conversational research style of Metaviews.ca will increasingly be applied in this direction, too.

With the technological stakes increasingly being raised, though, we have continued to focus our attention on the business of the Internet. Recently, our subscriber newsletters, teleseminars and social media conversation has focused in areas that include:

• The state of the relationship between producers and consumers — and whether they can ever really be one and the same

• Whether or not self-styled internet intellectuals can be taken seriously in the age where everyone has their own online experience

• The increasingly blurred relationship between online communities and the way that we interact in physical spaces

• Marketing efforts that reach beyond online coupons or viral videos to target customers based on where they are standing

• New currency alternatives that stand to subvert the banking system and interest rates of credit card companies

• How hardware producers are constantly challenged by the marketplace to emphasize similarities more than differences

• What needs to be done in Canada to keep pace with the global evolution of online access and the distribution of content

As the year draws to a close, Metaviews.ca will conclude its year of specific research into “The Future of Authority,” and launch a similar project on how the internet stands to transform health care.