Posted on 02/05/2002 3:41:59 PM PST by Common Tator
If one stops to think a moment, you can logically draw the conclusion that the main stream press is soon to be extinct. Bear with me a moment as I make the case for the decline and fall of the media empire.
The media was created to handle the problems of time distance and availability. Not many years ago there was no way for a person to stay informed without the media. The newsmakers contacted the media with what they wanted the public to know. The media reported it to the public using a means convienent for the public. The media reserved the right to color the news .... to make it better or worse depending on your perspective. News makers had no way to communicate directly with the public. The newsmaker did not have a way to communicate directly in real time. It did not exist. Radio and TV changed things, but not much. To be guaranteed air time you still had to own the station or network.
We were in the perfect position for the success of the media. There is a need for communications and only limited bandwidth available. The mediators ruled. People couldn't and didn't want to attend the affairs of goverment so the newspapers covered them and sumarized what took place. Radio and TV did the same think with an actual 10 or 12 second sound bite by the actual news maker. At best a slight improvement, since the media got to pick the sound bite. Sensational news like natural disasters were covered in the same manner. There was no way to get infomation without a surrogate.
The media is in effect a middle man between the people and the news events. But the reasons for papers and broacast are going away. Soon news makers will start going directly to the people using the net. We will go to the white house for a recording of the presidents views. From a 15 second headline to a 3 hour in dept presentation... and all theoptions in between. The same thing will be done by the party out of power. We can once again much like the Lincoln Douglas debates here it in person with out media bias.
Some people will build very popular Drudge like sites that make it easy for us to find the newsmakers that are currenty important. Soon the fire department can post info about fires directly. Safety services won't report to the news media and then have the newsmedia report to us. They will cut out the middle man. The same thing will happen with elected officals. And every organization from and culture from Wall Street to the Boy scouts.
The new paradigm is about cutting out the middle man. And that is likley to happen. Every time in history when people could cut out hte middle man, the middle man has been cut.
They key to this new freedom is nearly unlimited bandwidth. That means what people watch and read, will be not determined by those in power. In the world of cheap and easily obtained bandwidth, there is no need for mediator to mediate the news. The problems will not be access to bandwith but doing something that will garner an audience.
I think we will see the growth of sites that simply have links to the newsmaker sites. They will also have links to feed back sites like Free Republic. When a Bush or Daschle puts out a report on their positions, Free Republic will be sued if it doesn't post the entire article. Leaders will read the commentary sites to understand what the public is thinking.
The media long term is history because even Daschle thinks he would do better if he were pitching us directly. Bush knows very well he would do better if he could talk to us directly. Even the commentator class will go the way of the typewriter. Elected officals don't care what the pundits say. They want to know what the voter say. And the voters want to know exactly that the pols are up to. In the new paradigm we will depend on the opposite party to tell us what is wrong with the other parties plans. The thrust and counter thrust of opposing views will be a bigger hit than any media guru.
Think of bandwidth as allowying us to watch the actual game. With the media in control, it is like trying to understand what is happening in the superbowl by watching ESPN play CNNSI. The game is the President VS the Democrats.. not one reporter for or against another.
When both the public and the news makers learn they can communicate with out a mediator, the days of the media are long gone.
There is a reason why half the country votes Democrat, after all.
A contributing factor is the demonstrated difficulty in making content-oriented sites a paying commercial proposition (see Salon).
Advertising won't support a site that doesn't draw traffic (and demographics). And a site with shallow content can't earn enough in subscriptions.
Accordingly, the current formulations of the network news shows are commercial disasters on the web. And the CNN website probably has a fraction of the traffic that Drudge draws.
Similarly, the newspapers and newsweeklies have yet to turn a dime's worth of profit from their web ventures. And still don't have the foggiest notion of how to do it. In contrast, Rush 24/7 is doubtless a paying proposition.
You are absolutely correct. The more there is internet, the weaker the mainstream media.
The question becomes, then, which funnel is employed, and to what extent it modifies the connection between events & event makers and the audience.
Each technological revolution creates its own limitations within its possibilities. I disagree with the notion that radio and television created instaneous news communication: it was the telegraph that brought news real-time. Suddenly consumers had news instaneously, and not just through the newspapers (think Western Union). During elections, for example, national returns were broadcast by light signals from tall buildings. Otherwise interested consumers gathered outside telegraph offices. It was a tremendous empowerment and led as much as any other factor to the development of the "nation."
How many people here know that photographs were transmitted over the wires as early as 1900, or that transmissions were converted to type automatically?
The Associated Press was a conglomerate created in 1848 to manage the new telegraph technology. What started as a newspaper syndicate to relay news from Europe to New York from steamer arrivals at Halifax soon became the chief filter of domestic national news. The AP made it efficient and practical and highly profitable. It made the telegraph work for the people, thus its commercial success.
Then what happens: suddenly APs hegemony is busted by radio and television. Evening papers go out of business. The same thing happens to broadcast television: its dominance is thwarted by cable, or, as you say, greater bandwidth. We went from copper wires to isolated radio waves to fiber optic cable capable of 100s of channels, and so on. Yet AP remains, having adapted itself to the medium.
Has the content filter changed? I submit that the change has been in quantity not type.
The revolution comes wholly of when and where the middle man is truly cut. I love, for example, to see congressional web content posted here on FR: both sides of the equation are far better served than through some media filter. It is an huge innovation that you are correct to celebrate.
Here's my personal relation to the situation: I'm not a big web user outside of email or yahoo & library research. The web has greatly facilitated my research by cutting out various middlemen and other obstructions. I can learn more more quickly than ever before. Email, of course, saves time and money in ways unimaginable to me just five years ago.
Otherwise, I go to FR for the simple reason that I want to understand not hear the news. A smart politician would pay much attention to this site. Imagine being able to listen in to the voters' intimate reactions. Polls can never gauge anything more than watered generalities. FR is juice.
As you say, the reason is the absence of the middleman (precisely what a pollster is). The greatest advance brought us by JimRob is this ability of the consumer to react, real time & directly, to the filters. Yet is goes beyond: the consumers thereby supply their own content, become their own filters. Revolutionary.
Now, as I said, I don't bother with other websites. This is the filter I have chosen. Do other places accomplish what JimRob has created? I doubt it. And I doubt any of them were sued by the Old School filters because of it.
Yes, this is revolution -- more properly, a counter-revolution.
God blessya, Mr. Robinson.
I just don't think that content can be self-selecting, at least not without the middleman. The web, if not weakening, changes the nature of the wholesaler (which Druge is). That's not quite what Common Tator is saying, as I understand it. FR, OTOH, reverses the routine. I just don't see FR replacing the comics.
I don't watch much commercial tv, so my recent Super Bowl and Olympics excursions have brought Madison Avenue delights that I usually avoid. That is, when I haven't hit the mute button in time, I'm exposed to ads like an American to Mexican h2o: I'm not innoculated to the inanity, and blathering results.
One ad tonight, who/whatever, was about self-publishing, something to the effect of "anybody can get published." That may be well, and they'll sell whatever they sell, but does the guarantee include an audience?
Think not. So, back to advertising.
Funny, my grandfather, a leading librarian in the 1950s, was much interested in the creative potential of television advertising. He felt the competition and the funding therein created would expand the creative impulse to more Americans. The only consolation in his early death is that he never knew how right he was.
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