New Media Solutions to Old Media Bottlenecks

For all of the clamor over the Internet and various other digital technologies, the old media--print publications, recordings, broadcasting, and film--still have their virtues. They're readily available, easy to use, and generally affordable. It's not without reason that we use such terms as mass media and popular culture, after all: these are the sources of news and entertainment that most people want, most of the time, and they're firmly embedded in a $450 billion industry.[1]

What the old media are not, however, is participatory. We may read newspapers and magazines, listen to radio and recordings, or watch film and television, but the odds of any of us actually contributing to the mass media (beyond forking over $25 for a book, $18 for a CD, or $8 for a movie ticket, that is) are small. The mass media industries tend to be closed systems, dominated by a relative handful of interlocking giants, with room at the margins for alternative expression, perhaps, but with the vast majority of writers, recording artists, and other independent voices all but excluded from the critical advantage of mainstream distribution.

Ben Bagdikian has been chronicling the diminishing number and growing power of media conglomerates for years, declaring most recently that the 50 companies that dominated the mass media in 1983 had been reduced, through mergers and acquisitions, to a mere 5 two decades later: Time Warner, Viacom, News Corporation, Disney, and Bertelsmann. While Bagdikian's free-market critics complain that the Big Five's holdings (which include four major movie studios, some 60 cable channels, five broadcast TV networks, a satellite TV operation, a thousand or so radio and TV stations, and an enormous portion of the publishing industry) fall far short of a genuine "media monopoly," they conveniently overlook the rampant consolidation that afflicts all forms of media: 5 record labels control 75 percent of all recordings sold; 6 cable companies control 85 percent of the cable TV market; and the four major TV networks own 90 percent of the top 50 cable channels. And while it's true that there is "something for everyone" in the media marketplace today, homogeneity is the rule rather than the exception (which explains why public radio and television, as well as classical and jazz recordings, are all relegated to the far margins of the mainstream media, with ratings and sales that hover around 3 percent each).

The new media, in contrast, fueled by the PC and Internet revolutions, hold the potential to expand these margins considerably, offering low barriers to market entry, modest production and distribution costs, and an open invitation to engagement and participation. They're a turnkey rejoinder, in short, to A.J. Liebling's famous dictum that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one"--except for one glaring oversight. There's still no real digital discount for marketing and promotion costs, which remains the single most important advantage that the media conglomerates enjoy (and the main reason that a connected, collaborative approach to promoting alternative voices--the so-called dot-commons concept--is so necessary). How important is promotion to the mass media hegemony? Considering the amounts that Hollywood spends to hawk its wares, for example--a $39 million promotional budget for the average $103 million film--or the portion of TV advertising devoted to station promos--roughly 17 percent of the 18-20 minutes of commercials each hour--it's clear that Time Warner and Disney earn their profits the old-fashioned way: they buy our affection, with extensive marketing and cross-promotion campaigns designed to foster the next blockbuster movie, best-selling book, or platinum recording.

And so the old media will continue to age gracefully, both as analog commodities and increasingly as digital artifacts, as Viacom, News Corp., and other old media giants spread their tentacles into the online world, and as broadcast and cable television complete their transition to the digital platform. High-definition television, for example, will eventually prove to be as popular, and as insipid, as today's low-resolution, low-brow model, and copy-controlled MP3 files will reflect the continued dominance of Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and BMG, et al.

Yet there are reasons for optimism, too, as new-media tools become increasingly available for everyday use. Just as desktop publishing in the 1980s and the World Wide Web in the 1990s fostered new waves of self-expression, so have desktop audio and video spawned a new generation of independent artists. Thousands of musicians and composers have produced their own CDs (available on such sites as CD Baby, CDemusic, and IDN Music), while others make individual tracks available as downloadable MP3 files (on sites such as IUMA, GarageBand.com, and NoRecordLabel.com). Internet bandwidth constraints have impeded the growth of a similar video culture, but with the broadband revolution upon us, independent video sites such as Atom Films, Re:Generation:TV, and the Video Activist Network have gained in popularity. Drazen Pantic discusses the future of streaming media in Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News.

In the area of journalism, some 143 Independent Media Centers now operate in the US and abroad, featuring perspectives rarely offered in the mainstream press. Blogging has unleashed a new form of "desktop journalism," and even if the standards of institutional journalism sometime suffer in the process, the blogging phenomenon has also made an important contribution to journalism and the Internet alike. “Weblogs brought to life an aspect of the Web that had been mostly submerged," observes Dan Gillmor, the San Jose Mercury News’s technology columnist and chief blogger, "—the idea that this is a read and write medium, that we should be able to write on the Web as easily as we can read what’s in our browsers.”[2] As Into the Blogosphere, the peer-reviewed collection of essays on blogging suggests, there is a rich world of personal journalism and more on the Web, reflecting the growing universe of writers who “are not dependent on publishers to get their words out.” Progress has also been made in nurturing the "demand side" of the new-media equation, too, with new syndication and aggregation tools (e.g., RSS and Atom, and various newsreaders) that have created a virtual "Un-Associated Press," in which not only are readers becoming writers, but all consumers have the option of "configuring" the media to suit their needs and interests. More recently, this compile-it-yourself phenomenon has spread to audio files, through automated "podcasting" systems that transform PC-based and portable MP3 players into virtual shortwave receivers.

"Big Media," writes the San Jose Merc's Gillmor in We the Media, "…[has] treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn’t…. Tomorrow’s news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we’re only beginning to grasp now. The communication network itself will be a medium for everyone’s voice, not just the few who can afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satellites, or win the government’s permission to squat on the public’s airwaves."[3] Equally important, Gillmor's vision of news reporting as a "conversation" can be extended to other forms of expression as well, with communities of interest forming around music (e.g., NewMusicJukebox), photography (e.g., Unique Exposures), and scholarship (e.g., LionShare).

Ultimately, the new-media revolution comes full circle, as new digital technologies help preserve old media artifacts. Digital preservation projects range from Syracuse University’s collection of Dime Novel Cover Art to the Library of Congress’s vast American Memory project, with the Internet Archive’s expanding, encyclopedic collection serving as the collaborative model for the exercise of “our right to remember.”

In an effort to focus attention on the opportunities that new media afford to “route around” the gatekeepers and tollbooths of the old media, CDD has commissioned a series of papers exploring various aspects of digital distribution:

Judy Malloy: The Arts on the Internet: Art, Advocacy, News, Information

Cory Doctorow: Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books

Brad King: Digital Community: The Age of Technology and the Social Network

Jonathan Taplin: The IPTV Revolution (PDF)

Additionally, CDD has produced a study of its own, Sharing the Wealth (PDF), which explores the prospects for a new “information commons” online.

Notes

[1] Based on "rating data for television, cable and satellite television, and radio; survey research and consumer purchase data (units, admissions, access) for books, home video, Internet, interactive TV, magazines, movies in theaters, newspapers, recorded music, and video games," adults in the US spend approximately 10 hours (and $2.12) a day consuming the media. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the US: 2003, 123rd ed., Table No. 1125, "Media Usage and Consumer Spending: 1996 to 2006," (Washington, DC: Department of Commerce, 2003), 720. The $450 billion figure covers the publishing industries, motion pictures, sound recordings, radio and television, and cable systems. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract, Table No. 1120, "Information Sector Services--Estimated Revenue: 1999 to 2001," 717. 

[2] Dan Gillmor, “Key Battles Forge Fate of Free Software,” SiliconValley.com, 21 May 2003, http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/5911376.htm (31 May 2003). 

[3] Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People (Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly, 2004): XIII.