For the launch of 2006 Broadcast Live, a few words about the impact of IPTV, podcasting and blogs.
If you still read newspapers or tune into your TV set in the evening then the changes ahead will be a mystery. If you're an expert in the changing media landscape though the future will be even more mysterious. Ignorance in this case is bliss. At least it stops your head hurting.
So what's really happenning?
- We're going to see the rapid demise of traditional media franchises around the world. National broadcasters, whose audiences have suffered a gradual decline over the past decade, will wilt suddenly (twenty years ago when I worked at the BBC every Monday morning the whole unit met to discuss every single prime time BBC programme and its ratings for the previous week – ratings' decline was already an obsession then).
- We're going to see more co-created material as mainstream media companies seek to hold onto audiences until they realise there aren't enough stars to go around (even small independent producers are now trying to sign up "star" commentators; meanwhile pro-journalist fees are going down).
- We're going to see the disparity between celebrity earning and those of citizen contributors become so wide that it will be self-evidently immoral. Once again the mainstream will appear dangerously unethical.
- We're going to see some of the new names in the new media world capitulate and take old media's shilling but so what.
- We're seeing a new ethos emerge based on a wholly different set of social values
- We will see advertisers and marketers looking for ways to build ethics as well as emotion into their products and services (when I worked in telco consulting, the guys I worked with openly searched for ways to confuse mobile phone subscribers with tariff plans).
What are those values:
- Fairness
- Honesty
- Consideration for the views of others
- Duty
Sounds like utopianism? No, it's more of what we had up to the mid 1970s.
Are these changes the result of technogical advance. Well, they began two decades ago. That's how long audiences of the major media franchsies have been in decline. So the technological changes are not the cause. They are being driven by a formerly resricted but now unbridled desire that people have to communicate. It didn't have to come out as fairness, honesty, consideration and duty and left solely to technology it wouldn't have.
What's changing is the ability of a vast swathe of people to express an ethical preference. The long term inmpact of co-created content is primarily a moral one, a universe created by an immoral pursuit of audience at any cost by organisations that previously owned the attention of half the population of the advanced world replaced by one where people strive to make themselves relevant through fairness and decency.
Then of course there's always the pornographic mindset and the frivolous and the Youtube generation.
