Idées Fortes
New Media RIP
Stop me if you've heard this cyberdream recently: "Hey, let's do a personality-driven content site designed to engage people in daily chat and threaded discussion." Basically, this commonly heard business plan is the digital, text-driven equivalent of a phone-in radio talk show.
"Let's build something unique for this medium," other folks say, "something that uses streamed video and audio." Now, isn't this something that film, television, and radio have been doing for a century?
Or how about this one: "Let's set up some kind of online sweepstakes or gaming site, collect data on our players, and sell it for direct-marketing purposes." Great. Has anybody registered Ed-Mcmahon.com yet?
Media historian Erik Barnouw, in his book Tube of Plenty, describes a TV programming trend he calls "It's Completely Different From, But Exactly the Same As." Thus The Addams Family begat The Munsters. Friends begat The Single Guy. In the new media world, where evolutionary cycles proceed like generations of houseflies, we're already replicating the pattern.
What, in other words, is so new about new media? Most of the original talk about new media focused on CD-ROM and clickable multimedia environments. The result has been the creation of new media, notably videogames and kids' CD-ROMs for learning and entertainment. Virtual worlds like Myst Island remain pregnant with promise, as do various 3-D environments that can be inhabited by multiple users.
And there certainly are hundreds of exciting ventures and ideas floating around among the cybercognoscenti. Vertically targeted online communities with database resources, discussion groups, and online commerce components that target professionals like doctors – this is fascinating alternative media that could replace or threaten trade publishers and associations by using the technology to do something two-way and audience-empowering. It may even be new media.
But is publishing a webzine new media just because it's distributed online or has a discussion group attached to it? When a company like SonicNet launches a news wire service, a radio wire service, a television syndication special, and other traditional media properties, can we still describe SonicNet as a new media company? Or is it just a media company? And if it's just a media company, is that so bad?
The new media ideal promised three radical ways new media would be different from traditional media. First, new media promised to enable new voices. Because the barriers to entry are lower on the Net than in traditional media, Internet publishing was supposed to create a platform for people who in the past had little input into the shape of traditional media, meaning not only racial and ethnic minorities – who watched for a century as the nation's dominant ethnic majority defined the way they were portrayed in books, television, and film – but also political dissidents, regional publishers, and others.
Second, new media promised to break down the walls that traditionally separated media content creators – journalists, artists, et cetera – from their audience, audience members from sources, and audience members from one another. Third and finally, new media was supposed to open up new markets, enabling new and different kinds of retailers to sell new and different kinds of products to new audiences.
So, how does the new media scene stack up?
There have been new voices enabled. Gay publishing has certainly exploded. There are a handful of serious attempts to do alternative political community-building online. But the established new media firmament has shown little desire to enable new kinds of voices. The city guides and newspaper sites give us the same collection of voices we have always gotten. Sidewalk's got Bryan Miller, the former New York Times restaurant critic, reviewing hip Manhattan eateries, for example. Even the small media start-ups are the creation of Ivy League-educated white men, for the most part.
iVillage has tried to break down traditional barriers separating marketers and content creators from the audience and to open up spaces for audience members to reach each other. So has EarthWeb, via its Gamelan and Developer.com sites. Still, most of the rest of us just use the Net as a delivery mechanism to pump traditional print or broadcast content at a passive audience.
Finally, though there have been fascinating attempts by companies like N2K to set up alternative retail channels to sell music and even create custom CDs, for the most part we in New York have decided to set up online channels that essentially mimic traditional retailing. There are exceptions, of course: Miles Rose's snack cake distributor Regional Delights, or Glenn Hauman's promising BiblioBytes. But both efforts remain undercapitalized and underrealized.
Of course, using the Net to distribute print or broadcast media, or to set up an alternate distribution channel for traditional products, is an exciting thing. It threatens the hegemony of traditional media manufacturers and distributors. But it may be time to give it a new name. Alternative media? Maybe, though that smacks of the marketingspeak record companies used to sell the same old rock and roll to a GenX audience. Internet media? Certainly. It subsumes new media – there's no reason Internet media can't be new media, but it can also refer to what we do most of all: bring traditional media into the Internet age.
Body of Evidence
"Information wants to be free" is a statement only info-pimps could love. Indeed, our names, addresses, attributes, habits, and histories are bought and sold each day. Yet the aggregation of personal facts we present and represent tells a story, a narrative even, of our journey through life. Are we not the authors? If we must lubricate the ups and downs of the information economy with our life stories, we should at least come to some profit by it. Let the facts that describe us become not dividends for the data miners, but the assets of our business, the business of being alive. Your choice of cola, your telephone number, your mother's maiden name – demand that the law recognize these things are all truly yours, to be licensed and sold only by you as you see fit. The coupling of facts is a creative act, and those facts – our stories – should belong to us.
Medieval Sampling
Pop music savants tend to think of sampling as a revolutionary new concept, a postmodern challenge to music culture built upon structured appropriation.Wrong.A form of music endemic to late medieval France, the motet, used multiple quotations from both sacred and "popular" work as building blocks to construct a larger musical piece. What began as the introduction of new text (i.e., "word," from the French mot) to older music ultimately created more varied rhythmic patterns. To 13th-century ears, this was like laying down beats around a James Brown chorus.Medieval composers are said to have reflected the gestalt of their time, a hierarchical view of society as cathedral. The question is what today's sample-based music – whether it's hip hop, trip hop, techno, or acid jazz – says about our worldview.
Paying Attention
Addressing a rapt audience of technology futurists, UCLA English professor Richard Lanham recently extended some ideas from his book The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. If economics is the study of how human beings allocate scarce resources, he proposed, and if we are now moving from the goods economy to an information economy, then it would seem to follow that information is the scarce resource on whose allocation market leaders must focus.
Of course, Lanham reminded the audience, the world isn't nearly that simple. We are awash in too much information in too many forms from too many sources. From an economic perspective, information in this world has neither sustainable value nor predictable economic behavior. Is it wise, then, to build businesses or design information systems around the assumption that information has value? If not, do we discard economic theory or disavow the idea of a knowledge-based economy?
The single most valuable commodity, it turns out, is human attention, the set of intellectual processes that converts raw data – the firehose of unfiltered experience bombarding us in everyday life – into something we can use. But does attention itself have value? Can it be allocated? Do we need to be parsimonious with it, or are there imaginable processes and tools we can use to discover an elasticity of supply? Can we, in other words, apply some variant of economic theory to understand an attention economy? Can we use this perspective to help us create attention-based business processes and models? And can this perspective help us create the next generation of information products?
A range of seemingly disparate R&D efforts suggests the answer is yes. A growing body of technology research presumes a centrality of human attention: various MIT Media Lab programs, for example, like Things That Think and Tangible Media; Xerox PARC's work in ubiquitous computing and calm technology, which encalms by moving easily from the periphery of our attention to the center and back; and, finally, the Institute for the Future's positioning on microelectromechanical systems. Each endeavors, in its unique way, to reconsider the dynamic and holistic interaction between people and their information environment. Each derives insight from the understanding that while information is infinite, mindshare is not.
To shape businesses or create products, this perspective requires an exchange of ideas between professions and professionals as widely varied as storytellers and economists, gamemakers and advertisers, product developers and psychologists. We need this range of disciplines and participants to think more clearly about the issues defining the economics of attention.In the end, probing our assumptions about attention will redefine where and how computational horsepower can be applied. Indeed, the economics of attention will illuminate what computers can become.
Note to All Media
Reliable sources report that anyone can send any information they wish to anyone else via the Internet. As the network develops, any sort of print censorship or publication ban will become impossible in a practical sense. Governments and private parties will be largely unable to prevent transmission of information from willing senders to willing recipients. State secrets, copyrighted material, hate speech, pornography, sports scores, bomb plans will all be available to whoever wants them. Bandwidth increases will render meaningless government control of the broadcast industry and protected broadcasting oligopolies will be terminated. Many government regulations of business will be rendered meaningless as well. Production and sale of nonphysical goods will be completely deregulated, and many services that can be performed at a distance will be deregulated without reference to legislative or administrative process. Anything you can imagine – and a lot you can't – will be available via the Internet.
Mortal Kontract?
Until the 1990s, senior managers struggled to get the information they needed. Now they have everything they ever wished for – and more. Yet while intelligent agents now do most of the dirty work of mining data, there is a better way. A game environment is the perfect interface for large amounts of business data. Because the kinesthetics of any simulation model can be learned best by playing, the game becomes both a playground for discovering new skills and a testing ground for strategies and projects too dangerous or expensive to try in the real world. In the end, we have as much to learn from Super Mario Bros. as Salomon Brothers.
