<marquee>SOME HALF FORMED THOUGHTS ON MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY</marquee>
1. of mansions and highways
There’s this trend happening in media — something we’ve seen before in information industries.
Centralization and consolidation.
We saw this “Cycle” (as Tim Wu coined in his book The Master Switch) manifest in Bell’s telephone monopoly, in the film industry, in radio and broadcast television.
And we’ve seen the beginnings of shifts in online publishing to a few, small, centralized networks.
Facebook wants to be one of these networks. Twitter. LinkedIn. Apple. Snapchat. Even Instagram (yes, part of Facebook, but a separate enough product) is trying to establish itself as a curation station.
That is a great and worthy goal, and a very pragmatic one when you look around at the landscape of platforms that exist in the world today — everyone is playing the content game.
It seems every big player is trying to carve out their own proprietary space on the web. Because what unites media and technology in this moment is their quest for user attention.
The web was built on a premise of openness, democratization and freedom of access and information, which fundamentally changed the way we communicate and interact with each other, the way we view and consume things of all shapes and sizes, the way we relate to the world.
In thinking about the relationship between tech and media — consuming, eating, insert your metaphor of choice here — it’s kind of a fucking wild west. No one really has any idea what’s going to happen, but everyone wants to stake their own claim in the ground to ensure their own survival.
Tech is consuming media, sure. But media is only one of the industries that’s being re-shaped. Technology is remaking a multitude of other equally large systems—the rise of the sharing economy and on-demand apps for everything from to food to housing, from transportation to health, from wellness to house chores.
To me, the bigger question is what kind of future are we creating? As Robin Sloan argues in his eloquent piece over at The Atlantic, are these systems we’re building fit for actual humans? (emphasis mine):
It’s our responsibility as we make choices both commercial and civic — it’s just a light responsibility, don’t stress — to extrapolate forward, and ask ourselves: Is this a system I want to live inside? Is this a system fit for humans?
To fully consider the ~externalities~ (that’s like the one term I remember from IB economics in high school, plus I linked that shit to Investopedia so you know it’s legit) of the internet media products and platforms we’re building and consuming, let’s think about the media/tech/platform/publisher struggle in terms of infrastructure.
Tech companies with any stake in the content game are caught up in building mansions. Beautiful, rich, decadent, huge, stupid mansions. Everyone’s trying to out-mansion each other, building fancy amenities (fast page loading! network effects! $$$!) to entice as many publishers and content creators into their mansions as possible. Menlo Mansions added Instant Articles. Chateau d’Apple added fancy animations and transitions, and baked that shit into their OS so you couldn’t really be like “nah apple, you keep ur hundreds of millions of users…we chillin over here on our own website.” Then you, as an moderately successful publisher who’s used to living in a small, modest house, a house where you get your daily newspaper and weekly magazines from your soft butter yellow mailbox that your neighbors can’t stand to look at but holds a soft spot in your heart—you’re very susceptible to the mansion wow-factor. There are just lots of people in these mansions! And maybe we can get them to read our stuff! And everyone else is doing it. And what do we have to lose? We should play the game, plus, everyone is inviting us to these parties at these mansions?? But once you enter, wooed over by the scale and amenities, you may miss the sound of the door silently locking behind you. You’re stuck in this mansion, playing by the rules of its owner.
This is the fear, of course. As a publisher, a media outfit in today’s world, how do you distinguish yourself and your content and peddle that in an enticing package in these mansions when everyone else is doing the same? How do you stand out? And, even in the success case — where you get people to pay attention to you, the question then becomes: well, we chatted for a bit and I think we had a connection… but will that random mansion party-goer even remember my name, or what I’m about?
Contrast this with your house—with the butter yellow mailbox. (It’s butter yellow to represent the soft calmness with which you approach your reporting and storytelling.) It may not be as large, or fancy, or as objectively dope as a mansion. But it’s 100% yours. You chose the tile, you tend to the gardens, you take pride in entertaining people and letting them know they’re in Casa de Awl. You build a relationship with your guests.
So maybe instead of continuing to build more mansions, what we should focus on is building the roads, highways, to connect the smaller single-publisher homes. The more we invest in the infrastructure, we’ll see all different types and sizes of houses popping up, each with their own unique flair and style. Different colored shutters, varying degrees of lawn care, and a broad spectrum of mailboxes.
Rather than continuing down this mansion/singular empire-building path, what would our web look like if we focused more attention on the links and paths connecting things? Like responses, or incorporating content from other sources? [DISCLOSURE: i’m a terrible undercover medium employee]
2. to bundle, or not to bundle—that is the question
The examples of centralized information empires (think AT&T, NBC, monopolies with a unique hold over a “master switch” as noted above) is one axis to consider; another is the nature of content itself.
For this, we talk about it in terms of a CYCLE but rather a PENDULUM. New representation.
The internet came and unleashed a Great Unbundling, swinging the pendulum towards the opposite direction. This is evident from this deep research:
The basic narrative goes like this: with the rise of the internet came the rise of side doors. The web unbundled magazines, newspapers, which previously trafficked in discrete units of a things: a newspaper, a magazine, into its atomic parts—the article, the post, a link to be shared around on social media. It unbundled cable and television, with the advent of YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, offering more à la carte entertainment options as opposed to a prix-fixe, pre-scheduled programming.
But that’s only one part of the story. Here’s the rub: things didn’t unbundle all the way. We still think (by and large) about television in terms of show, not on an episode level. Sure, the network is less important, but there’s still the notion of a container, a unique sensibility and tone for a set of episodes. And yeah, publications saw traffic moving away from their homepages towards individual articles, but the construct of a publication still exists. There’s still a particular sensibility and voice that runs as a common thread throughout all of the content produced by a given publisher or media creator.
So now, we’re seeing a move back to re-bundling, across all forms and levels, from organization to individual. The pendulum swings back the other way. Netflix is creating original content, packaging these as shows of their own and dropping them season by season.
News organizations (that have the resources to do so) are bundling consumption experiences in standalone mobile apps, like NYT Now and BuzzFeed News.
And we’re in the middle of a podcast renaissance, a medium that traffics in shows as well, bundling interviews, commentary and analysis under one cohesive roof.
Newsletters, too, are having their MOMENT, and represent a return to bundling on an individual level. They serve as a way for writers and creators to collect works of their own, explore a topic, or curate meaningful things—all wrapped up in a convenient package delivered right to the inbox of a user.
3. context
The return to bundles feels good and compelling because we value context—and a container can help impose that context implicitly, over time. You know there’s a specific Radiolab frame of mind you have to be in when you start an episode, or if you’re in the mood for some murderous, political drama, you got House of Cards next in your queue.
Context can come from a variety of things — from friends, people you trust, or writers whose thinking you want to follow more deeply. Content is enriched by the people you care about.
Context is important for “why am I seeing this thing?” a question social platforms have largely done a good job of. But maybe that’s not the most compelling way to slice context. Maybe the more apt question is: “what am I about to see and am I ready?” The context of your person, being in the right state to engage with a particular piece of media, feels like something we’re lacking right now.
4. idk lol ¯\(°_o)/¯
So who really knows what the relationship of tech and media should look like? I’ll leave that to people much smarter than me.
But there are a few interesting themes that stand out to me in this space:
- Containers and bundling is compelling. Tech and media are approaching this from different directions: Twitter Moments vs. BuzzFeed News.
- How can we (tech, media together) invest more in infrastructure to lay a good foundation for a world of humans? Not monolithic systems competing against each other. [yes, I’m terribly naive, this is not lost on me.]
- CONTEXT! Things are made with specific intent, and rather than pushing things constantly to readers, let’s use technology to communicate the intent for a piece of media and create a specific space to welcome readers when they’re ready.
✌🏽
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