Tag Archive for 'mass media'

Thank you 2008, you finally gave New Media a name

Published on December 28, 2008 in Media, with 0 Comments. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Earlier this year Stephen Collins and Chris Saad had flown to Sydney for the Future of Media summit, and in front of me were having heated discussions on how come nobody invited them to the Social Media club in Australia. As they were yapping away, I thought to myself what the hell are they going on about. It turns out things I used to call "blogs", "comments" or "wikis" were now "social media". Flickr, Delicious, YouTube? No longer Web 2.0 innovations, but social media. Bulletin boards that you would dial up on your 14000 kbps modem? Social media. Online forums discussing fetishes? Social media. Everything was now bloody social media (or Social Media: tools are lower case, concept uppercase) and along with Dare Obasanjo I was asleep for the two hours when it suddenly happened.

social media bandwagon

However it turns out that this is a term that's been around for a lot longer than we give it credit for. It hung low for a while and then as some significant events occurred this year the term became a perfect fit to describe what was happening. It's a term that I've been waiting to emerge for years now, as I knew the term "new media" was going to mature one day.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our new world and the way of defining it: 2008 is when the Information Age's "social media" finally displaced the Industrial Era's "mass media". Below I document how, when and why.

Origins of the term and its evolution
The executive producer of the Demo conference Chris Shipley is said to have coined the term during a key note at the Demofall 2005 conference on the 20th September 2005. As she said in her speech:

Ironically, perhaps, there is one other trend that would at first blush seem at odds with this movement toward individuality, and that is the counter movement toward sociability.

As one reporter pointed out to me the other day, the program book you have before you uses the term “social” a half-dozen times or more to describe software, computing, applications, networks and media.

I’m not surprised that as individuals are empowered by their communications and information environments, that we leverage that power to reach out to other people. In fact, blogs are as much about individual voice as they are about a community of readers.

The term gained greater currency over the next year, as Shipley would use the term in her work and various influencers like Steve Rubel would popularise the term. Brainjam which popularised unConferences first had the idea of a Social Media Club around the time of Shipley's keynote and eventually formed it in July of the following year, which created more energy towards pushing for the term. Other people starting building awareness, like the Hotwire consultant Drew Benvie who from April 2006 has been writing the Social Media Report (and created the Social media Wikipedia page on 9 July 2006). Benvie said to me in some private correspondence: "When social media emerged as a category of the media landscape in 2005 / 2006 I noticed the PR and media industries looking for suitable names. The term social media came to be used at the same time of social networks becoming mainstream." Back then it was more a marketing word to conceptualise online tools and strategies to deal with them, which is why there has been distaste for the term that prevented its adoption.

It was 2008 however when several news incidents, innovations, and an election entrenched this term into our consciousness. Later on, I will explain that, but first a lesson.

web2_logos

So what is Social Media?
A debate in August 2008 created the following definition: "social media are primarily Internet and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. " I like that definition, but with it, you could arguably say "social media" existed when the first e-mail was sent in the 1970s. Perhaps it's going to suffer the fate of the term "globalisation" where in the 1990s people didn't know the term existed - but by 2001 in high school, I was told it had been around since the 1980s and by my final year of university in 2004 I was told "globalisation" started in the 1700s. Heaven forbid it turns into a term like "Web 2.0" where no one agrees but it somehow becomes a blanket term for everything that is post the Dot-Com bubble.

The definition is off-putting unless you have a fundamental understanding of what exactly media is. It might shock you to hear this, but a newspaper and a blog are not media. A television and a Twitter account, are not media either. So if you've had had trouble getting the term social media before, it's probably because you've been looking at it in the wrong way. Understand what media really is and you will recognise the brilliance of the term "social media".

Vin Crosbie many years ago answered a question I had been searching half a decade ago on what was new media. Crosbie's much cited work has moved around the Internet, so I can't link to his original piece of work (update: found it on the Internet archive), but this is what he argued in summary.

  • Television, books and websites are wrongly classified as media. What they really are, are media outputs. We are defining our world on the technology, and not the process. Media is about communication of messages.
  • There are three types of media in the world: Interpersonal media, mass media, and new media.
  1. Interpersonal media, which he coined for lack of an established term, is a one-on-one communications process. A person talking directly to another person is interpersonal media. It's one message distributed to one other person, from one person.
  2. Mass media is a one-to-many process. That means, one entity or person is communicating that one message to multiple people. So if you are standing in front of a crowd giving a speech, you are conducting a mass media act. Likewise, a book is mass media as it's one message distributed to many
  3. New media, which is only possible due to the Internet, is many-to-many media.

I highly recommend you read his more recent analysis which is an update of his 1998 essay (can be seen here on the Internet archive ).

That's a brilliant way of breaking it down but I still didn't get what many-to-many meant. When the blogosphere tried to define social media it was a poor attempt (and as recently as November 2008, it still sucked). But hidden in the archives of the web, we can read Stowe Boyd who came up with the most accurate analysis I've seen yet.

  1. Social Media Is Not A Broadcast Medium: unlike traditional publishing -- either online or off -- social media are not organized around a one-to-many communications model.
  2. Social Media Is Many-To-Many: All social media experiments worthy of the name are conversational, and involve an open-ended discussion between author(s) and other participants, who may range from very active to relatively passive in their involvement. However, the sense of a discussion among a group of interested participants is quite distinct from the broadcast feel of the New York Times, CNN, or a corporate website circa 1995. Likewise, the cross linking that happens in the blogosphere is quite unlike what happens in conventional media.
  3. Social Media Is Open: The barriers to becoming a web publisher are amazingly low, and therefore anyone can become a publisher. And if you have something worth listening to, you can attract a large community of likeminded people who will join in the conversation you are having. [Although it is just as interesting in principle to converse with a small group of likeminded people. Social media doesn't need to scale up to large communities to be viable or productive. The long tail is at work here.]
  4. Social Media Is Disruptive: The-people-formerly-known-as-the-audience (thank you, Jay Rosen!) are rapidly migrating away from the old-school mainstream media, away from the centrally controlled and managed model of broadcast media. They are crafting new connections between themselves, out at the edge, and are increasingly ignoring the metered and manipulated messages that centroid organizations -- large media companies, multi national organizations, national governments -- are pushing at them. We, the edglings, are having a conversation amongst ourselves, now; and if CNN, CEOs, or the presidential candidates want to participate they will have to put down the megaphone and sit down at the cracker barrel to have a chat. Now that millions are gathering their principal intelligence about the world and their place in it from the web, everything is going to change. And for the better.

So many-to-many is a whole lot of conversation? As it turns out, yes it is. Now you're ready to find out how 2008 became the year Social Media came to maturity.

How 2008 gave the long overdue recognition that New Media is Social Media
The tools: enabling group conversations
MySpace's legacy on the world is something that I think is under-recognised, that being the ability to post on peoples' profiles. It gave people an insight into public communication amongst friends, as people used it more for open messaging rather than adding credentials like the feature originally intended when developed on Friendster. Yes, I recognise public discussions have occurred for years on things like forums and blogs, but this curious aspect of MySpace's culture at its peak has a lot to answer for what is ultimately Social Media. Facebook picked up on this feature and more appropriately renamed it as "wall posts" and with the launch of the home screen that is essentially an activity stream of your friends, it created a new form of group communication.

The image below shows a wall-to-wall conversation with a friend of mine in February 2007 on Facebook. You can't see it, but I wrote a cheeky response to Beata's first message at the bottom about her being a Cabbage-eating Ukrainian communist whose vodka is radioactive from Chernobyl. She responds as you can see, but more interestingly, our mutual friend Rina saw the conversation on her homescreen and jumped in. This is a subtle example that shows how the mainstream non-technology community is using social media. I'm currently seeing how non-technology friends of mine will share links that appear on the activity stream and how they jump into a conversation about it right there. It's like over-hearing a conversation around the water-cooler and joining in if you want.

Facebook | Elias, Beata, Rina

This is what made Twitter what it is. What started as a status update tool for friends, turned into a chat-room with your friends; you can see the messages posted by people you are mutually following, and you can join in on a conversation that you weren't originally a part of. Again, simple but the impact we have seen it have on the technology community is unbelievable. Like for example, I noticed Gabe Rivera a few days ago had a discussion with people about how he still doesn't get what social media is. I wasn't involved in that discussion originally, but its resulted in me partially inspired to explore the issue with this blog post. These are subtle, anecdotal examples but in sum they point to this broader transformation occurring in our society due to these tools that allow us to mass collaborate and communicate. The open conversation culture of Web 2.0 has helped create this phenomenon.

Another Internet start-up company which I think has contributed immensely to the evolution of Social Media is Friendfeed. It essentially copied the Facebook activity screen, but made it better - and in the process, created the closest thing to a social media powerhouse. People share links there constantly and get into discussions in line. In the mass media, an editor would determine what you could read in a publication; in the Social Media world, you determine what you read based on the friends you want to receive information from. Collectively, we decimate information and inform each other: it's decentralised media. Robert Scoble, a blogging and video super star, is the central node of the technology industry. He consumes and produces more information than anyone else in this world; and if he is spending seven days a week for seven hours a day on Friendfeed, that's got to tell you something's up.

The events: what made these tools come to life in 2008
We've often heard about citizen journalism with people posting pictures from their mobile phones to share with the broader Internet. Blogs have long been considered a mainstay in politics this last decade. But it was 2008 that saw two big events that validated Social Media's impact and maturity.

  1. A new president: Barack Obama has been dubbed as the world's first Social Media president. Thanks to an innovative use of technology (and the fact one of the co-founders of Facebook ran his technology team - 2008 is the year for Social Media due to cross pollination), we've seen the most powerful man in the world get elected thanks to the use of the Internet in a specific way. Obama would post on Twitter where he was speaking; used Facebook in a record way; posted videos on YouTube (and is doing a weekly video addresses now as president-elect) - and a dozen other things, including his own custom-built social networking site.
  2. A new view of the news: In November, we saw a revolting event occur which was the terrorist situation in India (and which has now put us on the path of a geopolitical nightmare in the region). However the tragic event at Mumbai, also gave tangible proof of the impact social media is having in the world .

What's significant about the above two events is that Social Media has robbed the role played by the Mass Media in the last century and beyond. Presidents of the past courted newspapers, radio and television personalities to get positive press as Mass Media influenced public perception. Likewise, breaking news has been the domain of the internationally-resourced Mass Media. Social Media is a different but much better model.

What's next?
It's said we need bubbles as they fuel over-development that leave something behind forever. The last over-hyped Web 2.0 era has given us a positive externality that has laid the basis of the many-to-many communications required for New Media to occur. Arguably, the culture of public sharing that first became big with the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us sparked this cultural wave that has come to define the era. The social networking sites created an infrastructure for us to communicate with people en masse, and to recognise the value of public discussions. Tools like wikis both in the public and the enterprise have made us realise the power of group collaboration - indeed, the biggest impact a wiki has in a corporation from my own experience rolling out social media technologies at my firm, is encouraging this culture of "open".

It has taken a long time to get to this point. The technologies have taken time to evolve (ie, connectivity and a more interactive experience than the document web); our cultures and societies have also needed some time to catch up with this massive transformation in our society. Now that the infrastructure is there, we are busy concerning ourselves with refining the social model. Certainly, the DataPortability Project has a relevant role in ensuring the future of our media is safe, like for example the monitoring the Open Standards we use to allow people to resuse their data. If my social graph is what filters my world, then my ability to access and control that graph is the equivalent to the Mass Media's cry of ensuring freedom of the press.

Elias Bizannes social graph
Over 700 people in my life - school friends, university contacts, workmates and the rest - are people I am willing to trust to filter my information consumption. It will be key for us to be able to control this graph

Newspapers may be going bankrupt thanks to the Internet, but finally in 2008, we now can confidently identify the prophecies of what the future of media looks like.

The future of journalism and media

Published on December 23, 2008 in Media, with 0 Comments. Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Last week, Deep Throat died. No, not the porn actress but the guy who was effectively in operational control of the FBI during the Nixon years. Mark Felt was a guy who was in line to run the FBI from his number three position, but was passed up by Nixon who brought in an outsider. Whilst people often remark that the Russian government is controlled by the intelligence services, it's worth reflecting that the poster-child of the free world has its own domestic intelligence services yielding too much power over the presidents. Nixon broke tradition for the first time in 48 years, doing something other presidents couldn't do: it was appointing an outsider to run the agency. And so lays the roots to his downfall, in one of the most dramatic episodes in the mass media's history - a newspaper brought the downfall of one of the the most powerful men in the world.

Felt's identity has been protected for decades, and was only made public three years ago, arguably because someone else was going to expose him and he beat them too it. In an interesting article by George Friedman at Stratfor:

Journalists have celebrated the Post's role in bringing down the president for a generation. Even after the revelation of Deep Throat's identity in 2005, there was no serious soul-searching on the omission from the historical record. Without understanding the role played by Felt and the FBI in bringing Nixon down, Watergate cannot be understood completely. Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee were willingly used by Felt to destroy Nixon. The three acknowledged a secret source, but they did not reveal that the secret source was in operational control of the FBI. They did not reveal that the FBI was passing on the fruits of surveillance of the White House. They did not reveal the genesis of the fall of Nixon. They accepted the accolades while withholding an extraordinarily important fact, elevating their own role in the episode while distorting the actual dynamic of Nixon's fall.

Absent any widespread reconsideration of the Post's actions during Watergate in the three years since Felt's identity became known, the press in Washington continues to serve as a conduit for leaks of secret information. They publish this information while protecting the leakers, and therefore the leakers' motives. Rather than being a venue for the neutral reporting of events, journalism thus becomes the arena in which political power plays are executed. What appears to be enterprising journalism is in fact a symbiotic relationship between journalists and government factions. It may be the best path journalists have for acquiring secrets, but it creates a very partial record of events -- especially since the origin of a leak frequently is much more important to the public than the leak itself.

Now consider my own experiences as an amateur journalist.

After several years of failed media experiments, my university enterprise (I did it as a society, not as a company, because I want to treat this as my "throw-away" startup to learn but not be tied down when I left) at changing student media suddenly hit the gold mine: we created an online weekly "news digest" that literally became the talk of the campus for those in the university administration and the people surrounding it. An elite audience (not the 40,000 University of Sydney crowd), but the several hundreds of people that theoretically represented the campus and ran the multi-million dollar student infrastructure. Of the 23 editions we created that year, we literally had people hanging off their seats for the next edition: trying to predict the new URL, and e-mails with quotes of it sent out within hours of publishing.

The News Digest, October 29th 2004.

It was interesting because of how the product evolved during its first year. I started it thinking it would be a cool thing to have a summary of the news, once a week, in a "digest" format. The news was split arbitrarily as student, Australian and international. However within a few editions, the student news segment was no longer just about the latest party but about confidential information and the core reason why people read it. In the second edition I wrote:

USYD UNION : Chris Farral has been hired as the Union 's new General Manager. Farral has a highly reputable background in the ABC and various community-based groups. It has been a decade since the Union 's last General Manager was appointed, and as such we hope Farral will bring a new flair and vitality to the position. Chris also happens to be the father of Honi Soit editor Sophie. Does this mean an end to critical analysis in Honi's reporting of the traditionally stale and bitter Union ? No. That would require there to have been critical analysis in the first place. (EB)

Cheekily written but an innocent attempt to report news. Someone saw that, realised we had an audience, and in edition three we revealed:

SYDNEY UNIVERSITY UNION: Last week we reported that Chris Farrell was appointed the new General Manager of Sydney University's student union. This week we can reveal that close to $50,000 was spent on external recruitment agencies to find Mr Farrell. Where was he hiding? The selection panel was evenly split for two candidates: Paul McJamett, the current Facilities Manager and previously expected next-in-line for the job, was supported by Vice-President Penny Crossley, Ex-President Ani Satchithanada, and Human Resources Manager Sandra Hardie. Meanwhile Farrell was supported by current President Toby Brennan, and the two senate reps (one of whom is new this year to the Board). Crossley is rumoured to have crossed the floor, and made the casting vote for Farrell. (Elias Bizannes)

And then we go threatened with a law suit (the first of many in my life, it would turn out) because we exposed some dirty secrets of a very politicised group of people. The reason I wanted to share that story, was to have you see how we evolved from a "summary of the news" to a "tool for the politicians". The rest of that year, I had people in all the different factions developing relationships with me and breaking news. Yes, I knew I was being played for their own reasons. However it was a two way using: I was getting access to confidential information from the insiders. Our little creation turned into a battleground for the local politicians - and so long as I could manage the players equally, I won just as much as they did, if not more.

Up until now, I never realised (or really thought) that my experience in student journalism was actually how the big players of the world operate. Forget the crap about what journalism is: at its core, it's about creating relationships with insiders and being part of a game in politics, that as a by-product (not a function) also creates accountability and order in society.

On the future of journalism
For as long as we have politics, we will have "journalists". In the tech industry for example, the major blogs have become a tool for companies. I recently saw an example where I e-mailed a CEO of a prominent startup about an issue, and within days, two major blogs posted some old news to get exposure to fixing the issue. This CEO used his media credits with the publishers of these blogs, to help him with the issue. It's the same dynamic described above: people who create news and people with the audience. Heck - we have an entire industry created to manage those two groups: the Public Relations industry.

So the question about the future of journalism, needs a re-look. It's a career path being disrupted by the Internet and breaking traditional business models, with the new innovations going to have their bubble burst one day. Where we will find answers to the future, is where we can see in play the dynamics of news creators and news distributors, as that is where journalism will evolve.

Personally, I'm still trying to work out if the captive audience has now left the building. But my 2004 experiment in student media - targeting the same Gen Y's that don't read newspapers - is recent enough experience to prove the Internet hasn't broken this relationship yet. If you are looking to see what the future of journalism and especially the media is - you need to follow where the audience is. But a word of caution: don't measure the audience by its size, but by its type. One million people may read the blog TechCrunch, but it's the same one-million early adopters around the world that are asked by their Luddite families to fix the video recording machine. There is an indirect reader of a publication, but they are just as much influenced and can be reached out to, if determined by the direct reader. Even though Michael Arrington who started TechCrunch was a corporate lawyer, his successful blog has now done what the mass media used to do. That's something worth recognising as the core to his success, I think. Certainly, it validates that the future is just like the past - just slightly tweaked in its delivery.

The broken business model of newspapers

Published on November 25, 2008 in Attention economy, with 0 Comments. Tags: , .

About six weeks ago I took a week off work to catch up on life and do some research and testing of market opportunities. I had several hypotheses I wanted to test and sent content to a closed group of friends and colleagues. My goal was to watch how they reacted to it, to understand how time-poor people consume information...and it was an absolutely fascinating experience.

As part of this excercise, I took the task of reading all the major newspapers every day. It has literally been years since I've given that much attention to them - I used to read them daily, but my Gen-Y ways got the better of me, and I moved online. Unfortunately, I still can't seem to manage my online rituals to efficiently consume information (hence the research I did - turns out other people are struggling as well). Something I realised in the course of my research, is that whilst newspapers are losing circulation due to the Internet - there is a lot they could do to really improve their competitiveness.

Too much detail
I tried reading the main newspapers word for word, and it took me hours. I don't care how much people whine that they love the newspaper experience - the reality is, the people who read the news also work full-time. They barely have time to take out five minutes in their day; the reason people don't read newspapers is because of the complexity of life. Personally I work through lunch; and if I don't work, I am trying to do things in my life so as to make more time for myself after work. The weekend is literally the only time I have a chance to take a time out to read the newspaper - but given I neglect people in my personal life during the week and the myriad of other things I am involved in outside of work, means I don't even get that chance. I rarely sit down - that's why I read the news on my phone on the train.

Newspapers contain quality content, there is no doubt about that. However, if you are going to compete in the news business, you need to understand your audience: that's all they want. If you read any news item in a newspaper, it will be flowered with extra facts, background information, and endless perspectives to colour the central issue. For example, an article about the Central Bank in Australia dropping its cash rate by 1% had several paragraphs talking about the exchange rate. Yes, it's valid to talk about it - but there were another half dozen articles that did the same thing in the related coverage, and quite frankly, it's a separate issue. Another article about the impact of the rate change on local business, makes mention that 50 million pizzas get sold through Dominoes Australia. Interesting stuff - but is it relevant to the news?

A newspaper should have a headline, and literally report just on that news. I'm not saying they shouldn't report on the extra stuff - quite the contrary I love the extra stuff - but they fail to recognise that the problem with reading a newspaper is that it takes so long, and so people can only skim it. Report just the news, and let consumers follow up on the website with extra detail through special links provided.

Newspapers can't compete in news any more
I was able to get copies of the major newspapers between 11pm and 12.40am - as in, the night before people usually buy it. Those newspapers had been delivered by a truck, after being printed in a factory far away, with thousands of copies being loaded and distributed earlier that evening. Of course, there is a staggered distribution with some newsagents getting them through the night and early morning (about 5am), but it's still the same newspaper delivered at 12am as at the high profile newsagents.

The timeline for reporting news is a joke. The only hope a newspaper has in reporting news uniquely, is if it breaks it. By breaking news, it has a chance to take its time and frame the flow of information. But is this that common? Most newspapers use shared agencies to pool their resources with stories, like international news. Newspapers are being ignored by consumers, because they get news quicker on the Internet. Why must these media executives continue to ignore the reality that an online news organistaion is much more efficient in distributing breaking news. That's why newspapers existed in the past, but they no longer fill that role in society - newspapers need to get out of that role (or become "news brand", but no longer treating print as the prime distribution for that news).

The incentives and structures can't compete with this new world
Journalists, especially freelancers, get paid by word count.
Readers, especially time poor ones, skim through the newspaper.

See a problem there? It's called friction. In case you are a mass media executive, let me build on it for you: the economics of information have now changed. When your industry was created several hundred years ago, information was scarce and people had plenty of time. Today, it is people's time (or "attention") that is scarce, whereas information is abundant. Tradition through the "art" and skill of journalism seems to drive the industry more than its fundamental economic shifts. As I remarked at the Future of Media Summit several months back after hearing a mass media journalist rant on justifying her existence: "The skill of journalism? It's just as relevant as the skill of sword makers. It's nice, but I prefer a gun."

A business that does not respond to its market, will die one day. The cost structures of the newspaper (and magazine industries) are sustaining a structure that no longer suits the market for which it supposedly caters for. Instead, it relies purely on generational factors of a Luddite population to sustain its circulation, trying to make money on a model that has now been broken.

What's so exciting about this? The traditional media don't get it, in the same way a bible-basher won't accept there is no God despite presenting logic suggesting otherwise. I've heard this from friends in the industry, from people I've met at conferences, and from observing my own clients who are part of a broader media group.

Denial by a legacy industry can be a beautiful thing for an entrepreneur.