Media Habit

Returning to an ancient form of media

At TED2006, Helen Fisher gave one of the most extraordinary talks I've heard. (It's now available online.) An anthropologist, specializing in the evolution of love, she put forth the notion that we're returning to an ancient form of marriage. As women across the world move into the work force, we're finding relationships based on equality between partners — an equality we haven't seen since before the industrial revolution, before domesticated agriculture; relationships akin to what our ancestors experienced on the plains of Africa, 100,000 years ago.

This idea really resonated with me, and helped solidify a parallel theory I've been shaping ... that the most modern communication tools — blogs, podcasts, YouTube — are actually returning us to an ancient form of media, one in which everyone participates on almost equal footing. The success of blogs, after all, is built on a fundamental human urge to tell our own stories. (Six Apart founder Mena Trott spoke to this in her TEDTalk) Before mass media, before the written word — for all of human history — story-telling was a shared privilege. But this ancient urge, hardwired into our being, has been overwhelmed for the last 50 years by mass media, so pervasive, so dominating, so intoxicating and so isolating that they all but shut down our individual voices.

Mass media succeeded in creating a common culture, but did nothing to foster the communities that naturally emerge when people tell their stories to each other. That the advent of TV, in particular, was coupled with the rise of cars, suburbs and shopping malls was an unfortunate accident of history — one that exacerbated the isolation that TV unwittingly promoted. Now, finally, there is a counter-trend. Howard Rheingold framed it beautifully, when he wrote The Virtual Community, nearly 15 years ago: "Perhaps cyberspace is one of those informal public places, where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall."

From today's vantage point, I'd take Howard's statement one step farther: I believe the newest digital technologies are returning us to the most ancient form of media — one in which a natural order is restored; our individual stories take center stage, with the rest of the world as a backdrop. The stories may only be shared with a handful of people, and the conversation may focus on the larger stories of our time (Where do most blogs link? News stories, of course), but they're told in our own way, in our own voices. We're reclaiming our place at the center of our own lives. And we're all better for it.

From Harvard: "Good-bye Gutenberg!"

Worth a look: The recently issued Harvard Neiman Report: GoodBye Gutenberg. It's not a manifesto of the future; more a report from the frontlines of a changing field, with 40+ essays, mainly written by working journalists and editors. "Journalism is on a fast-paced, transformative journey, its destination still unknown," Melissa Ludtke writes in the introduction. Now, a collection of self-reflecting reporters doesn't scream "must-read" to me. But this is a spunky anthology, as it turns out, with sharp, focused stories from smart journalists dancing as fast as they can to keep up with their changing realities.

Worth a read: The entry by my friend Ethan Zuckerman and his colleague Rebecca MacKinnon, founders of Global Voices, who are on the leading edge of the worldwide blogging/citizen journalism movement.

The era of cage-free content

There's an old adage in the new media world: "Information wants to be free." And it does. But the freedom it seeks is no longer a question of cost; it's a question of format. We're living now in an era of cage-free content, where  all media (whether text-, audio- or video-based) is distributed and consumed across a wide range of channels, from which individuals pick and choose.

Yet media producers still have a terrible habit of caging their work within the medium they happen to understand. Why should the contents of a book be stuck on its pages? Why would a TV program exist only when broadcast? Why waste the hard work of 100 reporters by recycling their words each day or week or month? These are outdated questions. If you've spent any time thinking about media in the last 15 years, they're downright boring. And yet they're still shockingly relevant. Even the newest of new media companies are stuck in old ways. Blogs, those harbingers of media's next generation, aren't even distributed through EMAIL for heaven's sake. Not a single production company is making films or videos for the half-billion people who sit bored at their desk in front of a computer every day.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I developed TEDTalks, the podcast series we launch this week, which takes the most caged content imaginable — the lecture — and evolves it from something exclusive and ephemeral (reaching only the people gathered in a room) to something archivable, portable, and broadly accessible. Something long-lasting and far-reaching... Something more powerful than I am currently able to imagine, frankly: Content freed from its cage.

Why this topic? Why now?

You don't have to be an industry insider to see that media habits are changing. Digital technologies — from Tivo to the iPod to always-on Internet connections — are causing sea changes in the way we use media. We're consuming more media than ever (and often at the same time); we're creating more media ourselves; and we're doing all of this on our own terms: when, where and how we want. We read the The New York Times online, along with our friends' blogs; we download episodes of NPR shows, along with our collleague's podcasts. We take pictures on our cell phones and post them to Flickr. We watch NetFlix movies on our laptop during cross-country flights, and listen to David Sedaris books on tape driving to work. We Tivo American Idol, and devour entire seasons of Arrested Development on DVD (or is that just me?).

This isn't a new story of course. Those of us in the Wired world have been talking about it for years, but it's now playing out in real time. A new blog is created every second. In March, iTunes downloaded its billionth song and Wikipedia added its millionth entry. You can Tivo straight to your video iPod. And in the face of dismal box office sales, the LA Times declared that Hollywood was "losing a race with the zeitgeist."    

This matters not only to technologists and publishers, but also to people in general. As media habits change, so do we. And these days, the changes come fast and furious. And so, this blog. To help us keep track.