[Wikipedia-l] Survey of New Media in this week's Economist (fwd)

Mon Apr 24 05:00:35 UTC 2006

Speaking of research into collaborative media : here's the lead article 
about a recent Economist survey.  Wikipedia gets a kind tip.  Has anyone 
read the full report?

The entire survey is available as a PDF for $5... 
<http://www.economist.com/members/survey_paybarrier.cfm?story_id=6794156>

(thanks to aslam for the tip)

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AMONG THE AUDIENCE
Apr 20th 2006

The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and
participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change
both the media industry and society as a whole

THE next big thing in 1448 was a technology called "movable type",
invented for commercial use by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from
Mainz (although the Chinese had thought of it first). The clever idea
was to cast individual letters (type) and then compose (move) these to
make up printable pages. This promised to disrupt the mainstream media
of the day--the work of monks who were manually transcribing texts or
carving entire pages into wood blocks for printing. By 1455 Mr
Gutenberg, having lined up venture capital from a rich compatriot,
Johannes Fust, was churning out bibles and soon also papal indulgences
(slips of paper that rich people bought to reduce their time in
purgatory). The start-up had momentum, but its costs ran out of control
and Mr Gutenberg defaulted. Mr Fust foreclosed, and a little bubble
popped.

Even so, within decades movable type spread across Europe,
turbo-charging an information age called the Renaissance. Martin
Luther, irked by those indulgences, used printing presses to produce
bibles and other texts in German. Others followed suit, and vernaculars
rose as Latin declined, preparing Europe for nation-states. Religious
and aristocratic elites first tried to stop, then control, then co-opt
the new medium. In the centuries that followed, social and legal
systems adjusted (with copyright laws, for instance) and books,
newspapers and magazines began to circulate widely. The age of mass
media had arrived. Two more technological breakthroughs--radio and
television--brought it to its zenith, which it probably reached around
1958, when most adult Americans simultaneously turned on their
television sets to watch "I Love Lucy".

SECOND INCARNATION
In 2001, five-and-a-half centuries after Mr Gutenberg's first bible,
"Movable Type" was invented again. Ben and Mena Trott, high-school
sweethearts who became husband and wife, had been laid off during the
dotcom bust and found themselves in San Francisco with ample spare
time. Ms Trott started blogging--ie, posting to her online journal,
Dollarshort--about "stupid little anecdotes from my childhood". For
reasons that elude her, Dollarshort became very popular, and the Trotts
decided to build a better "blogging tool", which they called Movable
Type. "Likening it to the printing press seemed like a natural thing
because it was clearly revolutionary; it was not meant to be arrogant
or grandiose," says Ms Trott to the approving nod of Mr Trott, who is
extremely shy and rarely talks. Movable Type is now the software of
choice for celebrity bloggers.

These two incarnations of movable type make convenient (and very
approximate) historical book-ends. They bracket the era of mass media
that is familiar to everybody today. The second Movable Type, however,
also marks the beginning of a very gradual transition to a new era,
which might be called the age of personal or participatory media. This
culture is already familiar to teenagers and twenty-somethings,
especially in rich countries. Most older people, if they are aware of
the transition at all, find it puzzling.

Calling it the "internet era" is not helpful. By way of infrastructure,
full-scale participatory media presume not so much the availability of
the (decades-old) internet as of widespread, "always-on", broadband
access to it. So far, this exists only in South Korea, Hong Kong and
Japan, whereas America and other large media markets are several years
behind. Indeed, even today's broadband infrastructure was built for the
previous era, not the coming one. Almost everywhere, download speeds
(from the internet to the user) are many times faster than upload
speeds (from user to network). This is because the corporate giants
that built these pipes assumed that the internet would simply be
another distribution pipe for themselves or their partners in the media
industry. Even today, they can barely conceive of a scenario in which
users might put as much into the network as they take out.

THE AGE OF PARTICIPATION
Exactly this, however, is starting to happen. Last November, the Pew
Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers
create content for the internet--from text to pictures, music and
video. In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the
Institute for the Future in California, people no longer passively
"consume" media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but
actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in
whatever form and on whatever scale. This does not have to mean that
"people write their own newspaper", says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent
blogger and software engineer at Yahoo![1], an internet portal. "It
could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie
they saw," or as sophisticated as shooting a home video.

This has profound implications for traditional business models in the
media industry, which are based on aggregating large passive audiences
and holding them captive during advertising interruptions. In the
new-media era, audiences will occasionally be large, but often small,
and usually tiny. Instead of a few large capital-rich media giants
competing with one another for these audiences, it will be small firms
and individuals competing or, more often, collaborating. Some will be
making money from the content they create; others will not and will not
mind, because they have other motives. "People creating stuff to build
their own reputations" are at one end of this spectrum, says Philip
Evans at Boston Consulting Group, and one-man superbrands such as
Steven Spielberg at the other.

As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for
society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With
participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators
become blurred and often invisible. In the words of David Sifry, the
founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many
"lectures" (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are
transformed into "conversations" among "the people formerly known as
the audience". This changes the tone of public discussions. The
mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow
at Harvard University's Berkman Centre, "don't get how subversive it is
to take institutions and turn them into conversations". That is because
institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting
fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume
equality and eagerly concede fallibility.

Today's media revolution, like others before it, is announcing itself
with a new and strange vocabulary. In the early 20th century, Charles
Prestwich Scott, the editor, publisher and owner of the MANCHESTER
GUARDIAN (and thus part of his era's mainstream media), was aghast at
the word "television", which to him was "half Greek, half Latin: no
good can come of it." Mr Scott's equivalents today confront even
stranger neologisms. Merriam-Webster, a publisher of dictionaries, had
"blog" as its word of the year in 2004, and the New Oxford American
Dictionary picked "podcast" in 2005. "Wikis", "vlogs", "metaverses" and
"folksonomies" (all to be explained later in this survey) may be next.

WORD COUNT
"These words! The inability of the English language to express these
new things is distressing," says Barry Diller, 64, who fits the
description "media mogul". Over the decades, Mr Diller has run two big
Hollywood film studios and launched America's fourth
broadcast-television network, FOX Broadcasting. More recently, he has
made a valiant effort to get his mind around the internet, with mixed
results, and is now the boss of IAC/InterActiveCorp, a conglomerate
with about 60 online brands. Mr Diller concedes that "all of the
distribution methods get thrown up in the air, and how they land is,
well, still up in the air." Yet Mr Diller is confident that
participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry.
"Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,"
he says. "Talent is the new limited resource."

"What an ignoramus!" says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He
advises companies on the uses of new media tools. "Look around and
there's tons of great stuff from rank amateurs," he says. "Diller is
assuming that there's a finite amount of talent and that he can corner
it. He's completely wrong." Not everything in the "blogosphere" is
poetry, not every audio "podcast" is a symphony, not every video "vlog"
would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia[2], the
free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes
Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers,
radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will
be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and
what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on
human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on
collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration
technologies that are now being developed. "The old media model was:
there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are
multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out," says Joe Kraus,
the founder of JotSpot, which makes software for wikis.

The obvious benefit of this media revolution will be what Mr Saffo of
the Institute for the Future calls a "Cambrian explosion" of
creativity: a flowering of expressive diversity on the scale of the
eponymous proliferation of biological species 530m years ago. "We are
entering an age of cultural richness and abundant choice that we've
never seen before in history. Peer production is the most powerful
industrial force of our time," says Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED
magazine and author of a forthcoming book called "The Long Tail", about
which more later. (Mr Anderson used to work for THE ECONOMIST.)

At the same time, adds Mr Saffo, "revolutions tend to suck for ordinary
people." Indeed, many people in the traditional media are pessimistic
about the rise of a participatory culture, either because they believe
it threatens the business model that they have grown used to, or
because they feel it threatens public discourse, civility and even
democracy.

This survey will examine the main kinds of new media and their likely
long-term effects both on media companies and on society at large. In
so doing, it will be careful to heed a warning from Harvard's Mr
Weinberger: "The mainstream media are in a good position to get things
wrong." The observer, after all, is part of the observation--a product
of institutional media values even if he tries to apply the new rules
of conversation. This points to the very heart of the coming era of
participatory media. It must be understood, says Mr Weinberger, "not as
a publishing phenomenon but a social phenomenon". This is illustrated
perfectly by blogging, the subject of the next article[3].

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[1] http://www.yahoo.com/
[2] http://wikipedia.org/
[3] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=6794172