Among the audience
Apr 20th 2006
From The Economist print edition
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!, 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, 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.
It's the links, stupid
Apr 20th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Blogging is just another word for having conversations
“IF YOU want to have a fun debate, ask bloggers what a blog is,” says Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo! Only a few years ago, that debate would have been short. So few people blogged that most of them knew one another and could probably agree on a definition. Today a new blog is created every second of every day, according to Technorati, a search engine for blogs, and the “blogosphere” is doubling in size every five months (see chart 1). From teenagers to corporate executives, the new bloggers all have reasons of their own for engaging in this new pursuit.
What, then, is a blog? A “personal online journal” is the definition that most newspapers, including The Economist, offer when they need to be brief. That analogy is not wrong, but nor is it entirely right (conventional journals usually come in chronological order, whereas blogs are displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry on top). More importantly, this definition misses the main point about blogs. Traditionally, journals were private or even secret affairs, and were never linked to other journals. Peeking into the diary of one's big sister typically led to a skirmish. Blogs, by contrast, are social by nature, whether they are open to the public as a whole or only to a small select group.
The word “blog” appears to date back to 1997, when one of the few practitioners at the time, Jorn Barger, called his site a “weblog”. In 1999, another user, Peter Merholz, playfully broke the word into “we blog”, and somehow the new term—blog—stuck as both a verb and a noun. Technically, it means a web page to which its owner regularly adds new entries, or “posts”, which tend to be (but need not be) short and often contain hyperlinks to other blogs or websites. Besides text and hypertext, posts can also contain pictures (“photoblogs”) and video (“vlogs”). Each post is stored on its own distinct archive page, the so-called “permalink”, where it can always be found. On average, Technorati tracks some 50,000 new posts an hour.
Among the other technical features of blogs, two highlight the quintessentially social nature of blogging. The first is a “blogroll”, along the side of the blog page, which is a list of links to other blogs that the author recommends (not to be confused with the hyperlinks inside the posts). In practice, the blogroll is an attempt by the author to place his blog in a specific genre or group, and a reciprocal effort by a posse of bloggers to raise each other's visibility on the internet (because the number of incoming links pushes a blog higher in search-engine results). The other feature is “trackback”, which notifies (“pings”) a blog about each new incoming link from the outside—a sort of gossip-meter, in short.
Blogging is also about style. Dave Winer, a software engineer who pioneered several blogging technologies, and who keeps what by his own estimate is the longest-running blog of all (dating back to 1997), has argued that the essence of blogginess is “the unedited voice of a single person”, preferably an amateur. Blogs, in other words, usually have a raw, unpolished authenticity and individuality. This definition would exclude quite a few of the blogs that firms, public-relations people or newspapers set up nowadays. If an editor vets, softens or otherwise messes about with the writing, Mr Winer would argue, it is no longer a blog.
This explains the initial appeal of blogging as an outlet for pure self-expression. As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, a well-known blog on American politics, put it when asked why he blogs: “It beats yelling at the television.” But venting an opinion is usually only the start. “At first, I saw it as about publishing; now I see it more as a revolutionary way to communicate,” says Mena Trott. The company she runs with her husband Ben, Six Apart, illustrates this with its three main products. Their flagship, Movable Type, with its obvious publishing connotations, is a popular software service for heavy-duty or celebrity bloggers, including Mr Reynolds. So is TypePad, a similar service with web-hosting thrown in. Blogs powered by these two products have an average of 600 readers, says Ms Trott, although a few are read by more people than are some newspapers.
But Six Apart's third product, LiveJournal, is a very different kind of blogging tool. Some 60% of LiveJournal users are under 21 and female, says Ms Trott. Many of the posts are about who snogged whom last night and what happened next, why I'm sad, how adults don't get it, and so forth. Other posts ask things like, “Anybody want to catch King Kong at 8:00?” and have the replies in the comment pane below within minutes. That is because many adolescents consider e-mail passé, and instead are using either instant messaging (IM) or blogging for their communications, says Ms Trott. Like blogging, e-mail was supposed to be “asynchronous”, meaning that the people taking part do not have to be online simultaneously. But today's adolescents have never known e-mail without spam and see no point in long trails of “reply” and “cc” messages piling up in their in-boxes. As for synchronous communication, why adults would send e-mails back and forth instead of “IM-ing” is beyond them.
The Dunbar number
For these LiveJournal blogs, the average number of readers is
seven, says Ms Trott. Such small audiences are common in participatory
media. Indeed, they may conform to the biological norm, whereas
mass-media audiences may have been an aberration. Robin Dunbar,
an anthropologist at the University of Liverpool, has studied
primates and discovered a surprisingly stable ratio between the
relative size of the neocortex (thought to be responsible for
the evolution of intelligence) and the size of groups formed by
particular species. For humans, Mr Dunbar calculated, the upper
limit is about 150. Many clans, tribes, fan clubs, start-ups and
other groupings remain well below this limit, as do most blog
networks.
The LiveJournal groups of readers are typical of the new-media era in another way. The bloggers (ie, creators) are one another's audience, so that distinctions between the two disappear. Creators and audiences congregate ad hoc in meandering conversations, a common space of shared imagination and interests. MySpace.com, a social-networking and blogging service that last year was bought by News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate, reflects this quality in its name.
Conversations have a life of their own. They tend to move in unexpected directions and fluctuate unpredictably in volume. It is these unplanned conversational surges that tend to bring the blogosphere to the attention of the older and wider (non-blogging) public and the mainstream media. Germany, for instance, has been a relatively late adopter of blogging—only 1% of blogs are in German, according to Technorati, compared with 41% in Japanese, 28% in English and 14% in Chinese.
But in January this year “the conversation” arrived in Germany with a vengeance. Jung von Matt, a German advertising firm, had come up with a campaign in the (old) media called “Du bist Deutschland” (“you are Germany”). The advertisements were intended “to fight grumpiness” about the country's sluggish economy, said Jean-Remy von Matt, the firm's Belgian boss.
But German bloggers found the idea kitschy, and subsequently dug up an obscure photograph from a Nazi convention in 1935 that showed Hitler's face next to the awkwardly similar slogan “Denn Du bist Deutschland” (“because you are Germany”). In the ensuing online conversation, Mr von Matt's campaign was ignominiously deflated. Outraged, he sent an internal e-mail to his colleagues in which he called blogs “the toilet walls of the internet” and wanted to know: “What on earth gives every computer-owner the right to express his opinion, unasked for?” When bloggers got hold of this e-mail, they answered his question with such clarity that Mr von Matt quickly and publicly apologised and retreated.
Inadvertently, Mr von Matt had put his finger on something big: that, at least in democratic societies, everybody does have the right to hold opinions, and that the urge to connect and converse with others is so basic that it might as well be added to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “It's about democratisation, where people can participate by writing back,” says Sabeer Bhatia, who in March launched a company called BlogEverywhere.com that lets people attach blogs to any web page with a single click. “Just as everybody has an e-mail account today, everybody will have a blog in five years,” says Mr Bhatia, who helped to make e-mail ubiquitous by starting Hotmail, a web-based e-mail service now owned by Microsoft. This means, Mr Bhatia adds, that “journalism won't be a sermon any more, it will be a conversation.”