Date: Sun, 19 Nov 95 22:44:56 PST From: Vin Crosbie To: Vigdor Schreibman - FINS Subject: On the new dimensions of media [The below message was condensed in length from a longer article on which the writer is working, and reproduced here with the permission of the author. The message was originally transmitted via the online-news list, Oct 5, responding to a comment by Vigdor Schreibman on the need for newspapers in the transition from print to the electronic media to plan for a future that sustains not merely what we "can" have but what we "ought" to have.] ON THE NEW DIMENSION OF MEDIA By Vin Crosbie The Internet as a public medium continues to defy conventional media analysts because it isn't a rationally constructed medium, but part of a much larger, spontaneously evolving dynamic in the history of media. We are witnessing a dimensional change in media. Many of the traditional key metrics used to measure and operate previous, flatter media do not and will not apply to this new media. The advent of digital media technology in this decade has catalyzed the answer to a latent public need. Each individual in society has a basic human need for easier access and better control over what, how, and when that individual gets the news, information, entertainment, and communications she seeks in order to live her life better. The aggregate of these individual needs is a public need. This public need had long remained latent because the dimensions of previous media were mainly unable to satisfy it and even contained it. Yet, the advent of digital technology, which brings with it virtually unlimited media addressability, allows fulfillment of that latent public need. And media, above the control of its very operators, are striving to take advantage of that addressibility and satisfy that need. The Internet as medium is neither a fad nor a parallel extension of existing media. It is the first manifestation of a dimensional change in media, an entirely new direction. This new dimension is difficult to see, even deniable close-up, yet looms indisputably when seen in long perspective: The aboriginal dimension of media is one-to-one, beginning in conversation and extending through aristocratic or monastic scribes, libraries, mail, telegraph, and telephone. The original dimension of media in the conventional sense is one-to-many, beginning with social and political oratory, theater, town criers, printed broadsheets, newspapers, magazines, cinema, radio, and television. Media have always embraced technologies to extend reach, but the basic dimensions of media have always been confined by the delivery capabilities of those technologies. The inherent limits in the analogue deliveries of telephony, print, and broadcast frustrated fullfillment of public needs. The addressibility of digital technology now shatters the limits of analogue. It frees media to evolve spontaneously the first, albeit rudimentary, many-to- many media of which the Internet and the promise of future multiple-way video personal information, communication, and entertainment systems are parts. This third dimension of media, the many-to-many, will fundamentally change the history and business of media. The Internet as mass medium has evolved from military and academic technologies to satisfy that latent public need for easier access and better control over what, how, and when each individual gets the news, information, entertainment, and communications she seeks in order to live her life better. It evolved spontaneously. No company invented the Internet as a mass service. No telecommunications corporation wired it as a public utility. No media company created it as a medium. Madison Avenue didn't market it. The dawn of the Internet as medium caught the traditional media and telecommunications aristocracies sleeping. Even the major online services were forced to offer Internet access by public demand. The individuals who constitute the public are embracing the Internet, despite this new medium's still somewhat inaccessible forms, because it satisfies their need. It increasingly shifts control over access to content from that aristocratic few to the individual many. In the remaining years of this century, we will see the rise of Personalized Media and Personalized Marketing. Personalized media and personalized marketing will dominate the 21st Century in the way that mass media and mass marketing have dominated the 20th Century. The development of digital many- to-many media will give rise to personalized media and personalized marketing much in the way that development of one-to-many media gave rise to mass media and mass marketing. The term many-to-many is most often misunderstood to be a variant of one-to- many media in which everyone becomes his own publisher or broadcaster and cacophony results. This misinterprets the flow desired within many-to-many media by the public to satisfy aggregate individual needs and misplaces its predicate. In one-to-many media, each individual receives the same thing as every other individual who uses that medium. In many-to-many media, however, each individual will receive exactly what that individual wants, tailored to that individual's specific needs. Many-to-many can satisfy an individual's needs in ways that traditional one-to-many media, with its uniform content, cannot; it can satisfy the aggregate of individual needs in ways that traditional one-to-many media, with its uniform content, cannot. It encompasses and extends previous media in a new way. It permits an individual's reception not only of one-to-one media and one-to-many media, but simultaneous and intelligible reception of as many ones-to-one media and ones-to-manys media as that individual so desires. What this means for you the individual is that ultimately the news, information, entertainment, and advertising which you see on a website, EMail, or whatever future convergence of television and personal computers occurs, will be different from the ads that someone else sees in the same media. The news, data, programming, and ads you see will be based on your expressed or recorded preferences and interests. Computerized algorithmic programs for preference will search and deliver to you editorial, entertainment, and product and service information specific to your interests and demographics. Many-to-many is not a Mass Media with Mass Marketing, but a Personalized Media with Personalized Marketing. It lately has become fashionable in one-to-many media companies to disparage 'intelligent agentry' as if such software will forever be exclusionary, isolatory, and thus will doom public acceptance. Such statements are akin to those of the 1895 stable owners who said that automobiles will never operate as reliably as the horse. Future 'intelligent agentry' will utilize 'fuzzy' logic, heuristic thinking, and intentionally contain overrides that allow reception of appropriate common or serendipitous content. Market dynamics will make it this way because none of the media's three constituencies will ever permit any total exclusion, isolation, or control: No individual who uses media wishes to be totally excluded or isolated. Any 'intelligent agentry' that delivered only what an individual predesignated risks isolating that individual from news of major events (Bosnia, Oklahoma City); from unexpected features that individual might find interesting (O.J. Simpson's Bronco drive, what's 'hot' on TV, etc.); and from general product and service awareness. Fascination at the unexpected is basic to human nature, so no significant group of consumers will ever allow themselves absolute control of what they see. No absolute self-control means there will always roles for editors to tell the public what it does not yet know. The same for entertainment. Producers seek to reach widespread audiences of interest by the most efficient and economical means. No longer do two programs at the same time have to compete for the same viewership. You can watch concurrent "Beverly Hills, 90210" and "Dave's World" and "seaQuest 2032" at anytime, if you are so inclined. The major differences will be that, while electronic publications and programs may have release dates, they will not have set delivery or airtimes, and the consumer, not publisher or broadcasters, will have explicit control of format, depth of information, play, pause, rewind, and printout, as well as general topical control. Nor has any media ever created yet been unaffected by commercial forces. Advertisers and marketers, national, regional, or local, will always need to create product awareness. This necessarily will require to some degree an ability to intrude into the individual's choices. Such intrusions will be much less intrusive than as in one-to-many media. It may be as simple as an advertiser sponsoring free one-to-one communication between individuals. It may be the individual using 'intelligent agentry' to search and deliver specific product or service information, such as the network making a market between an automobile owner and competiting tire shops. Or it might simply be commercial, not editorial, information as the individual's information of value. Everyone professes to hate ads, except those for things that interest them which on many days becomes information more valuable than news. Thus, individuals' self-interests not to be isolated or excluded, combined with the commercial and political forces that want to create awareness or consensus, will cause developers of 'intelligent agentry' to develop algorithms that seek not absolute matches, but 'fuzzy' and individually heuristics ones. Many-to-many media can more specifically match individual's interests and needs to content than can any one-to-one and one-to-many media. This is particularly important for advertisers and marketers. They seek to reach consumers who may be interested in their products or services, and to develop continuing relationships with such consumers. Digital addressibility more efficiently matches consumers and products or services than can one-to-many media. Moreover, it eliminates the waste circulation costs inherent in advertising in one-to-many media. There is no need to buy publication or broadcast reach in hopes that some of those reached might be interested. Digital many-to-many can specifically address a product or service to those consumers who are interested, might be interested, or, in its most rudimentary form (one possibly now), perfectly fit the demographic the advertiser seeks. Demographic delivery on demand. History and markets seek such efficiencies, as does the pubic who are already seeking it today on the Internet. The body of Internet 'intelligent agentry' is growing yet so embryonic as to be virtually useless today, so individuals manually exercise their control and preferences, using search engines such as Lycos and Yahoo. The fundamental changes being wrought by the advent of many-to-many media directly threaten the current media aristocracies and status quo in much the ways that the advent of democracy did to the aristocracies of two centuries ago. Many-to-many media will break out because the public wants it, regardless of the one-to-many practices and business plans of those who today own and operate the media. The more dimensions to media, the more control is held by the consumer. Many-to-many media is a quantum leap in emancipating the consumer. She is less 'owned' by the publisher, broadcaster, or online or cable systems operator. Given one dimension of media which puts control over content in the hands of a few versus another dimension that puts control in the hands of the many, which media will ultimately win? Like the aristocracies who were faced with democracy two hundred years ago, most of today's media aristocracies are unfortunately too close to their existing one-to-one or one-to-many media to perceive the true new dimensions of many-to-many media. They fail to see that a fundamental evolution and change are occurring. With the same certainty as the stable owners who one hundred years ago declaimed that the automobile would never replace the horses that mankind had been relying upon for over 2,000 years, they deny that many-to-many media will supplant their one-to-many media publishing or broadcasting businesses during the next century. Most media companies today still view many-to-many media as simply another extension to one-to-many media, the way cable was to broadcast television; something over which they can maintain their existing degree of control, can simply acquire, or a means of eliminating physical delivery costs or repurposing content written for other media. They believe they can transplant their existing one-to-many media businesses intact into the different environment of many-to-many media. They exercise the old media metrics and practices in a new media experiments. They do not allow themselves to see beyond the traditional one-to-many media paradigms and theories upon which their old business interests, theoretical structures, and analytic and academic credentials, were based. Their experimental situation is akin to that of the established physicist one hundred years ago who persisted in applying Newtonian theories when the replicable evidence of the Michelson- Morley experiments was already indicating what would later be called Relativistic effects. As many-to-many media dawns, these major media companies are perplexed by it. Those media companies who have attempted to transplant their one-to-many business intact into the many-to-many media are already experiencing the fundamental differences and perplexities of this new world. The value a publication delivers to advertisers is less in many-to-many than in one-to-many media. Advertisers don't need publishers as much to reach consumers. Advertisers operate their own websites, equal to publishers. The texts of ads are no longer resident on the publisher's website, but are on, operated, and controlled by advertisers on their own websites. Publishers are relegated to publishing hyperad links which say, in effect, 'for information about this, go outside our publication'. Advertising and editorial in many- to-many media uncouple much of their traditional one-to-many symbiotic relationships. Consumers need not be fully exposed to advertising on a publisher's website, as they would be in print. They aren't forced to click into a hyperad the way they would be forced to see an adjacency in print. They are accessing online publications virtually for editorial content alone (at least until fashion magazines go online). They can even virtually circumvent advertising (simply by turning a browser's graphics off), thereby also gaining access speed and the ability to printout offline. What in one-to-many media would be paradoxes abound. Numerous publishers have tried to transplant the one-to-many practice of charging both consumers and advertisers for access to the publication, only to find that in many-to-many media you can do one or the other, but not both. Although many-to-many media can exactly count how many consumers saw an ad, unlike one-to-many in which only statistical approximations, such as Nielsen, Arbitron, and MRI, are possible, the shift in control within many-to-many media provides consumers with more secure anonymity. Media companies place hopes in auditing software, such as that developed by Nielsen/I-PRO which compares domain addresses left on website logs to the demographics known about that domain; however, the demographics known about any specific individual with, for example, a 'prodigy.com', 'aol.com', 'compuserve.com' or '.edu' domain address are too general to be valuable attracting advertisers. Even product awareness advertising, the revenue bedrock of one-to-many media, is less secure for publishers and broadcasters in many-to-many media. Advertisers can publish and broadcast, create changing and compelling content as easily as can publishers or broadcasters, from advertisers' own websites. There is no newstand shelf space online in which to fight for placement; no limited channel space. Many-to-many websites aren't an awareness medium, unlike one-to-many broadcast or print. Worse, in many-to- many media awareness advertising can migrate to what in one-to-one or one- to-many media are unadvertisable media. Because the many-to-many media now encompasses the one-to-one, advertiser-sponsored free E-Mail or visual telephony or group chats become advertising awareness media. Specific examples of one-to-many media companies that fail to understand and adapt many-to-many are already numerous: News Corp. had failed over 18 months and two iterations of management to transplant its proprietary one-to- many businesses atop the small many-to-many business it bought in Delphi Internet. Ziff-Davis designed an online service specifically for the practice of one-to-many publishers and sold it to AT&T, yet neither company has been able to successfully launch Interchange and attract masses of consumers and advertisers to it, except in the specific Minneapolis and the District of Columbia markets (and only successfully in the former due to local management that understand the many-to-many). The much-publicized Full Service Network tests in Orlando didn't result in much at all because they kept most control of access in the hands of their operator, Time Warner, and kept their consumers 'owned' by that company. Even vaunted Wired suffered a schism when publisher Lou Rossetto mandated a traditional one-to-many approach over the pure many-to-many approaches Hotwired planned under founding Editor Howard Rheingold, discoverer of virtual communities, and Dr. Johnathan Steuer, who wrote the textbook definition of interactivity. Faced with the threat the advent of many-to-many media is to their sinecures, market shares, and ways they do business, most major media and telecommunications have a vested interest in preventing a shift of control further towards the consumer. Many would prefer to limit interactivity to just consumer responses that buy merchandise, access an inventoried video, or respond to a publisher's poll. Will future interactive systems allow you to send their kids' video to grandma as well as it allows the system operator to send you 'Home Alone' (the Full Service Network syndrome)? Vigdor Schreibman of this listserv has ably scouted the coming battle about which way future communications and media will flow. The lobbying and legislation in Washington during these next years will have critical repercussions on whether communications will help increase democratization of information and communications or help major media companies maintain one-to-many sinecures. The changes being wrought by digital technologies, the evolution of many-to- many media, will play out over a generation in time, the minimum human period necessary for acceptance of a new medium. Many companies will adapt. Many will not survive, supplanted by new companies that today are basing business strategies specifically upon many-to-many fundamentals. The advent of many- to-many media means fundamentals and many basic rules have changed; many key metrics will no longer work. As in two dimensions, the sum of the sides of a triangle always equals 180-degrees, yet in three dimensions they might not. -- end -- -------------------------------------------------------- Vin Crosbie, FreeMark Communications, Inc. One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza 125 CambridgePark Drive New York, NY 10017 USA Cambridge, MA 02140 USA voice: (212) 207-9290 (617) 492-6600 fax: (212) 207-9295 crosbie@freemark.com http://www.freemark.com --------------------------------------------------------