We know less about the future than we’ve ever done. Because I just turned up on technology voices I though this argument needed a revisit this time for a technology audience.
From The San Francisco Bay Area to the Austrian Alps, entrepreneurs and conglomerates are probing how the average viewer is evolving as a media animal.
The assumption, a pure business assumption, is that tomorrow’s media will be dominated by what Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED magazine and author of an upcoming book by the same title, has admirably documented as The Long Tail. Big Media buys it.
“The major players [in the media industries] all buy into the long tail theory of content,” explains Michiel Pelt, a research manager at the research labs of telecommunications supplier Alcatel in Antwerp, Belgium. “Most content companies do,” he adds, “and are looking for ways to create business out of user content.”
But the Long Tail theory of media evolution, that there will in future be no mass markets for Hollywood films or formerly prime time television, misses the point. The future is not only about a highly fragmenting communications industry.
Consumers Evolve: “Right now, we are exploring new structures of knowledge and power through our recreational life,” says M.I.T media specialist Henry Jenkins who works in the C3 (Convergence Culture Consortium), “which are helping us to acquire new skills in collaborative problem solving which are already spilling over into other important sectors.”
Jenkins has written his own account of new media that pushes the argument beyond the confines of the content industries and underlines the significance of a newly enfranchised population to business in general.
But we face a situation Jenkins explains where our understanding of what is going on is no longer solely in the hands of experts and academics:
“The grassroots communities of fans, bloggers, and gamers are playing an active role in documenting, analyzing, predicting, and responding to media change, operating alongside of and in many cases, doing a better job than, traditional sites of learning and research,” advises Jenkins.
This collective strength of Internet users, and an inability to grasp its significance through the traditional mechanisms of research reports, academic papers etc, is about to pass to the television screen as well as to the Internet radio waves.
Another point I’ve made repeatedly here is that the values lying behind that are also important. We seem to be going back to a value system we last visited pre-Reagan and Thatcher.
Knowledge is made up of both elements, a vast dialogue where niche expertise is brought to bear on any subject, and a value sytem that predaates the capitalist moment of triumph.
Add in a new view of entitlement. People want not just luxury but glamour in their lives.
I wonder how many companies, media or otherwise have begun figuring this out.
