What next?
May 8, 2008 Architecture, Multimedia, TV No Comments
This morning I attended a gathering of the great and the good, and listened to three very interesting New Media pioneers speak about possible futures, courtesy of Policy Unplugged: Kevin Anderson, Blogs Editor of The Guardian, Jeremy Ettinghausen, Head of Digital Publishing at Penguin books, and Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor for Education for Channel 4. It all happened at a rather fun and progressive feeling members club, and coffee and croissants were in abundance, so I was happy.
Jeremy kicked off by asking, when everyone is a publisher, where are the editors? I’m sure Clay Shirky would have something to say about that!
He whet our appetite by declaring that he would be ‘very surprised if there wasn’t a major consumer electronics company releasing an eBook this year’ - something he has wanted to believe since 2001, but without actually telling us anything of a sensitive nature, he thinks this year it will happen.
Wheras 10,000 people bought the Rocket ten years ago, and sales stopped there, the question is, is there now a mass market potential for an eBook? How much are people going to pay for a book so that Penguin can support the development of new work? DRM is a non-issue if the user experience is a happy one, people will pay for it (witness the phenomenal success of iTunes)
Beyond finding a business model that will work for publishing however, where the internet has changed things is in our reading habits. Where movable type gave rise to a linear experience of reading - and mode of thinking - he cited evidence that shows hypertext has given rise to a centre-out way of scanning webpages, and suggested that this may have had a corresponding effect on the way we think.
Ultimately, publishers must begin to see themselves as distributors of ideas, rather than books. Storytellers will win, but win what? Asked about audiobooks, Jeremy outlined his vision of the integrated book, where you can go from a paper-like eBook experience, to a car journey (where the audiobook picks up where you left off), to the laptop where you can carry on reading from the screen. A few years off perhaps, but a compelling vision for the industry; and more importantly, the consumer.
Kevin Anderson picked up and riffed on the familiar theme of the Death of Newspapers, stating his aim thus: ‘To take the tools that are disrupting the industry, and applying them to our journalism’
Other sources of journalistic content have turned the old business model on it’s head by making full use of new, and open source technologies, slashing costs in the process. When the cost of experimentation (and potential failure) is so low, it’s possible to ‘fail forward’ - let the successful experimentation pay for the failures.
The Guardian group has experience confirming customer loyalty: Kevin cites the Observer Music Monthly and Observer Food Monthly as examples of journalism which attracts a dedicated and committed community - and which can then presumably feed an advertiser funded business model.
Kevin’s media equation of paper = passive wheras online = active may be a little simplistic, but in the new models, it’s undoubtedly community and connectability which is the name of the game. How else are you going to inspire loyalty from your audience in an age of such varied choice?
Matt Locke has made a name moving Channel 4’s six-million pound education budget off the television online, with the aim of utilising the spaces where his target audience hang out, sites such as YouTube and Bebo, as the medium for his slate.
With an abiding interest in futurology, Matt amusingly prefaced his talk with the suggestion that if you ask a bunch of thirtysomething geeks to discuss ‘What’s next?’, you’ll doubtless hear of futures in which geeks have really cool jobs.
Citing Gilbert Scott’s telephone box as a classic consensual architecture of the Private, he notes that the first device that really dissolved the old world division of private and public was the mobile phone. Now public and private are navigated - somewhat awkwardly so far - by body language (that look which says ‘I may be walking down the street, but I’m having a private conversation!’), and interventions such as that odd yellow crosshair you find in front of cash machines, and which people will walk around even if no-one is using the machine!
The Private and Public are rapidly eroding, if they’re not already over: they have been replaced by the Personal and the Social. Spaces on the internet often find themselves somewhere in between the two; witness blogs, which are often written with friends of the author in mind; Facebook, where the dividing line is particularly mysterious; and MSN (a popular chat client), where young people have been seen to develop complex and subtle gradations of contacts (eg. ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘bitches’, ‘wankers’, ‘possible future boyfriends’, etc.), reflecting their developed awareness of their selves in the social web.
Matt suggests that the great contribution of such spaces is not choice (young people think nostalgically of a time where there were only four channels), but voice. Many of his young audience cannot imagine a time where one had to have permission to speak in a public realm (eg. by writing to a newspaper).
So the technologies that will take hold will be, like the text message, MSN or (potentially) Twitter, above all playful, and vernacular. Whilst in any social space, real or virtual, there will be problems (eg. bullying or just simple embarrassment), new technology will take hold not by dictating communication, but by facilitating it.
