The Future of Media
This entry is motivated by a recent blog post by my friend Rick. My response connected with a longer than natural line of thought that grew too lengthy to send as an email response — so instead I’ve portaged the content here to my personal website to edify the two or three people that actually visit this web site with any regularity.
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Every generation fades away, yet I believe that we are also seeing an economic sea-change bigger than mere generational replacement.
The feature bloom on cell phones is a tacit admission on the part of service providers and telephone designers that people are unwilling to pay for anything unless teased with a bunch of freebies (typically never used) – so even the most basic cell phone is overwrought with useless peacock-feathers. If not for the near-monopoly of 3G / GSM / 4G / WiFi networks — connectivity itself — people would be getting free basic service while paying a small add-on fee for things like video of their cat chasing its tail.
As monopolistic and unavoidable as they seem to be, telecom service contracts may not be around much longer. Your web blog is free (mine, too, if I hadn’t ‘upgraded’ to the non.wordpress.domain ‘kenramsley.com’ — setting me back a whopping $10/year). Eventually just like this — basic phone service will be free (already via Skype and may expand further via Google setting up physical networks or some like-minded successor). At that point I can imagine the entire telecommunications industry running like wordpress.com — free for anyone willing to endure a few targeted ads and feature-rich for those so inclined to pay a little extra.
Thinking thermodynamically — it makes so much sense.
As much as telecoms fight this tooth and nail, the big-iron carriers will lose the battle — just like the pharmaceutical industry has been losing their battle to introduce antibiotics as fast as the bugs can mutate. Engineering may save the day for a while, yet the thermodynamic process (a.k.a., nature) always wins out in the end. Nothing is entirely free, yet as long as new generations of service providers can make money at ever decreasing prices, pressures will exist to reduce those prices — eventually giving much of the content away for free.
For this very reason business models wear out just like mechanical clocks. Even ideas have a life-cycle.
Contraptions, food, physical transportation, housing, personal accessories (like beds) will remain an industrial product for as long as people are alive – so we’ll need jobs to pay for that stuff. Anything that can be consumed without industrial production and physical distribution will be free (as free as can be free) — replacing similar items that come at a price. New business models will be designed to support this (set up like much of Google) where end-user customers receive services at the expense of advertisers.
In some ways this is nothing new. Free newspapers were around for years. Some may still be found at trains stations.
We already see which model wins the most customers. Almost no one pays for something when they can have something almost as good nearly for free. Free iPhone GPS navigation is lousy, and yet it’s already killing $200 dedicated GPS units simply because it is seen as nearly free (the telephone isn’t free and the monthly service isn’t either – but those would be paid for anyway). Garmin et. al. are doomed unless they learn how to make those premium dollars while giving basic services away.
Since information really can’t be controlled, anyone in the information-creation business is on their way out of business. Notwithstanding the recording industry suing it most avid customers, most information can be shared peer-to-peer at no cost (every last bit of it eventually). If some conglomerated company tries to charge for content (like Rupert Murdock), the vast majority of people will find something equivalent elsewhere fro free. Clearly, if Rupert Murdock can’t win this game, the age of for-profit books and news and other sorts of content is coming to an end (unfortunately this does not spell the end of ‘reality’ TV or celebrity infidelity mania).
Entertainers will need to make a living the ol’ fashion way — on stage before live and paying audiences. Writers will need to sign their books. Anything that can be replicated will be replicated at no cost to anyone. Only personalized and singularly customized products will have any value requiring the payment of real money. The notion of art will return to the notion of creating individual works of art.
More than ever ‘business’ will be the process of controlling content such that nothing can be purchased in a generic way or replicated to replace what the business sells at a premium. Above all else corporations will work to develop image and brand loyalty, since no practical reason to buy one thing over anything else will remain.
Speaking of Thermodynamics (and entropy in particular), even just a half-generation ago lots of people shared a small selection of communication channels. Now, with everyone able to broadcast and publish anything they want (within reason) and with everyone able to receive this in their shirt pocket — there’s no need for ‘channels’ anymore, and the whole notion is going away. I’m getting pretty close to dumping cable TV for just that reason. I can find almost anything I want on some website for free. Why watch TV? Especially – Why pay for it?
Created for money more than art — media content is mostly second-rate. Almost everyone can see how labors-of-love often create much better content, and instead of major news and entertainment outlets churning out the same cookie-cutter headlines, we are discovering how friends (and personally cultivated connections) provide far more interesting content and often convey far more reliable and detailed news.
The whole concept of ‘official information’ also seems to be fading away. Even now it’s safe to say that almost everything knowable by anyone will be accessed at some point from almost anywhere at anytime to any level of detail desired – all without copy editors or PR wonks or government spokespersons – or even college professors for that matter. In such an environment, official information is mostly cherry-picked factoids spun for impact not for informativeness.
This is the new media reality, though hardly a good thing by any stretch of the imagination. In the absence of editors and sober-mined officiating, the post-modern ‘Age of Information’ (just like the original Wild West) is already becoming the worst sort of perverse breeding ground for rumors, snake-oil salesmanship, ideological haranguing, fear-mongering, and deliberate misinformation. Yet like global warming, given human nature – the onslaught is unavoidable – at least during the transition to some future (and presently unobservable) synthesis where we apply our remaining sanity to the notion of constantly rising sea levels of malarkey.
Unfortunately it’s left to those like us stuck between sea-changing generations to make sense of this.
