New Media vs Old Media; a revolution?
Reading the special survey of the Economist on new media, one will probably end up believing this. The above statement begs the question, what exactly is “New Media”? What does it change? And exactly why is it revolutionary?
For a moment let us look into media without distinguishing between “new” and “old”. The primary function of this entity is to filter and aggregate useful and interesting information and serve them to consumers. This is in effect a kind of a circular linking because any information is generated by the masses and not “media” and to them it is ultimately passed. In the past, however, technological limitations warranted a centralised structure (with the media companies sitting at the top) so that events distributed in time, space and domain are not missed out by others not subscribed to the same; every thing that was to be distributed became an industry - movies, news and music - dominated by few players.
The crux of the arguement presented in the survey is that due to technological advances and recent developments the existing structure of the media industry is under threat and that the existing players have to radically change or risk being outdated. Revolutions are a natural consequence of power getting centralized and concentrated in too few hands that hold all the cards. It is a disruption - sometimes gradual and peaceful and on other occasions violent and sudden, of the status quo, of the established norms, of the ingrained ways of being. While publishing managed to free the masses from the grip of the liturgy making education accessible and affordable, over centuries it has itself turned into a mafia (reading Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, will make this clearer than daylight), which has stodgidly refused to either improve or change the with the times. And they have been able to do this because the barriers to entry remain unscalable for new entrants.
What the so called new media - blogs, wikis and podcasts - has done is take a dig at the existing hierarchy using methods completely alien to them. They leverage the increasingly ubiquitous presence computers and broadband connections to sidestep the entrenched players. Internet with some help from companies like Google and Yahoo! (providing services like Blogger, del.icio.us and Flickr) has allowed them to reach out to the masses without even investing an extra buck, revolutionizing both content publishing and delivery. Everyone today with a broadband connection can become a publisher (as I am being with this blog) and similarly anyone can become a consumer without relying on the media giants for distribution.
Another huge change in the “new media” is that pieces of information published rarely remains static; any information published is merely the starting thread for a conversation between the publisher and the subscriber. The content is in the truest sense dynamic, atleast for wikis and blogs.
Since everyone is now able to publish and each information snippet ensues a conversation the basic challenge of media companies change from information gathering to information sieving; separating the wheat from the chaff. Information changes from discrete entities to a continuum and search along this continuum becomes a task of primary importance. Another valid question is, how does one compare the wisdom of the masses to the wisdom of one known knowledgeable man? Does the name “Albert Einstein” at the end of an article entitled “Relativity” mean nothing and is rated equally with one written by a high school geek just learning about Relativity? While wisdom of the masses is all good, when the time of reckoning comes how many will stand by it? Good search techniques should ensure that the name “Albert Einstein” does indeed mean something.
And so we come to the question of what are media companies? Given the trend of search becoming so important are Google and Yahoo! media companies? Is MS with live.com trying to become one? Though each of them is trying to solve the problem of search in a different manner, this point of view is not without justification. Additionally Google and Yahoo! generate most of their revenues [>98% and ~85% respectively] from advertisements the standard revenue source for all media companies.
However as the new media marches on against the strongholds of the media strongmen, there is a chance that the flagbearers of the new wave, the Googles and the Yahoo!s themselves are in some danger of being overrun. Most of these companies rely on huge and costly infrastructure in the backend to drive their innovations. The availability of building such backend support is a barrier to entry for new players. However with the arrival of services such as Amazon’s S3 this might not remain true for a long time.
It is however again important to note that the aim of the new media and their publishers (not pushers) is rarely to generate commercial gains. These innovations reduce the entry levels for people trying to gain knowledge and give them atleast a flavour of the topic. That way they help increase the market base for the traditonal companies because somebody who becomes really interested in Programming will buy a boxed set of Art of Computer Programming rather than reading my rants on the same. Businesses are already maturing towards these synergies; we need to look no further than the record giants and Apple for the iTunes and the still in rumour phase linkup between Apple and Disney for examples.
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