WIRED:I AM as guilty as anyone of talking up how the internet is a revolutionary medium. Perhaps, after nearly two decades of the thing, we should try at least to tone that rhetoric down.
Apart from anything else, it seems to discourage as much innovation as it encourages, particularly in media industries.
Working out a business model for producing content online is hard, but it’s not hard to an unprecedented degree.
I used to think that the internet was radically different, because I didn’t really understand the transitional nature of other media. Television, radio, magazines: they all seemed frozen in time compared to the rapid and random mutations of the net.
It is an easy mistake to make. When we build a business for creative works, we assume that the unique creation is novel, and always changing, but the medium and market in which that creation is expressed is largely static. When you make a pop music single, you don’t expect the market itself to vanish in mid-recording. You finance a film, assuming that there’ll be cinemas to play it in.
The medium is static, and the knowledge on how to manage it is also shared. To write a book, I don’t have to invent publishing from scratch. My publisher can apply the same techniques she uses on other books to mine. The knowledge transfers and is stable.
For much of its history, I warned creators that the internet wasn’t like that.
Do not treat it like a single new medium, I would say, treat it as a laboratory for creating new media. People would happily attempt to clone existing magazine websites, say, in order to put their own works online, unaware that the website itself was part of the creation: and few readers wanted a clone of another creation. In most cases, seeing the Huffington Postsucceed did not mean you could copy it, put in your own articles (or summarise everyone else's, depending on how you see the Huffington Post), and suddenly have a similar, but distinguishable venture.
Now, though, I’m realising that the rest of the media world isn’t like that either. The medium isn’t stable anywhere. Any industry aspires to construct a stable and well-mannered (controlled) market. But if they manage it, they quickly become loaded down with incumbents – so your chances of making it there are severely limited. But most of the time, all that apparent stability is merely external appearance. Apparent constants aren’t; assumptions are constantly challenged, in every media industry. The internet may not be that different from other media, except in one key respect. We did not have a clue as to where even the apparent stability was going to emerge from.
As time proceeds, one begins to see what the seeming constants are in the internet media world as much as anywhere else. It looks like the web will stay around. It looks as if the form of blogging will stick about for the next decade. It looks like advertising will fund written media. It looks like the mobile internet will mirror all of these assumptions, even as internet use switches from the PC to the mobile and tablet device.
Do these assumptions seem obvious? Then the internet content industry has settled down, at least in some aspects, becoming as static as any other. But disruptors come to all media, whether it is the death of the broadsheet or colour TV; the rise of the summer blockbuster or the album’s decline.
The internet will continue to be a generator of new media, just as the generic technologies it runs upon will continue to evolve into new physical platforms. That is almost a constant in itself, now. We know the net will move to mobile, because we have a sense that a hand-held device will be as powerful as a desktop, and that storage and processor speeds can only increase.
The future of media doesn’t seem as unpredictable as it used to, because we can see the trendlines more clearly. Perhaps some new, revolutionary change will arrive. Perhaps some new format, between games and journalism, say, will pop up and stabilise. Perhaps some unexpected innovation, like a leap forward in battery power or size, will create hardware we cannot even imagine.
But for now, the next few years of digital media development have an internal stability to them. And if that sounds a little boring, then at least it should calm those who fear that culture and the creative arts are on the verge of collapse. The internet has joined television, film and radio, as a technology with a past, and an extrapolatable trajectory. The future is not fixed, but at least you have some past performance to base your gambles on.
And if you do not like the odds, maybe it is time for the internet to be disrupted by something outside its domain. It is certainly its turn to face the terrifying unknown.
