Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

For his business blog, visit http://www.digitaldeliverance.com

individuated media

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Vin

I’ve Revamped and Rebranded the Digital Deliverance newsletter to Focus on What has Already Superseded the Mass Media as Consumers’ Predominant Way of Obtaining News, Entertainment, and Other information. As old dogs such as me get older, we sometimes forget the new tricks we had learned. “You’re publishing a newsletter to teach media executives the lessons that you taught in graduate school? Won’t this confuse people who instead expect a newsletter that comments about news and current events in the media industries? Moreover, you’ve devoted the past 20 years your life to recognizing the rise of Individuated Media. So, why not call it that rather than brand it with the name of your 30-year-old consulting company.” The perceptive and beautiful Ph.D. with whom I live mades some good points! So, welcome to the Individuated Media newsletter (formerly Digital Deliverance newsletter). I’ve revamped and rebranded it. The many lessons I wrote and taught in my required course for New Media Management master’s degree students (an elective for doctoral candidates) at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, I’m instead converting to podcasts and videos for this newsletter’s paying subscribers—a better way to differentiate what they get from what free subscribers receive. I’ve increased this newsletter’s frequency to more than weekly. And I’ve also changed its tone. I had been these past years publishing academic publications such the International Journal of New Media Studies, the Nordic Journal of Media Management, the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, etc., rather than media industry trade journals. Academic writing is virtually required to be bulletproof and concrete, particularly because any dissident or non-conformist articles get attacked by the hidebound or philistine. Yet that can tend to make academic writing sometimes as heavy and ineffective as the Maginot Line. My career started 50 years ago in journalism, in which writing should be short and snappy, particularly in a newsletter. Here we go! I’ve a reputation of not taking prisoners at conferences, symposia, and seminars about ‘New Media’. I’d rather immediately kill a faulty idea or unsound strategy than let those go viral. However, I regret that wasn’t faithful to that hygienic practice during an online journalism conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts 20 years ago. The result is that I’m today writing about a misguided strategy that has cancerously metastasized since. In my opening remarks as that day’s co-moderator of the conference, I warned against the Mass Media industries pursuing a strategy that I’ll now outline below. […]

The Hallmark Flaw of the Mass Media

Vin

Ask historians to say when the Industrial Era began and they will cite dates in the 18th or 19th centuries when a factory powered by hydraulics or steam engine was first constructed in their nation. I think they’re wrong. The start of the Industrial Era shouldn’t be defined by what powered mechanisms of mass production, but by the invention of such a mechanism itself. In approximately 1454, the entrepreneurial metallurgist Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press: the world’s first mass production device. Prior to Gutenberg, books were rarities, affordable only by the church or the rich. A typical scribe or monk in a scriptorium could copy by hand two to four pages daily, laboriously producing a simple book in three to six months. If the book was also ‘illuminated’ with illustrations or decorations, it could take up to three years. Gutenberg’s press used metal type characters that were set in a mirror-image analog of the page to be printed. This was then inked and pressed onto paper. A two-man team operating the press lever or crank could imprint hundreds of pages daily, enough to produce hundreds of books per month, more than a lifetime’s production by a scribe or monk. The societal effects of Gutenberg’s press are often cited as ending the Middle Ages and beginning the Modern Era. This first mass production device fundamentally improved how human beings distribute, store, and trust information. Nearly half a millennium later, Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of wireless broadcasting markedly extended the immediacy and reach of information. He converted electrical teletype signals into analog electromagnetic waves of radiation that could be instantly received across huge distances. The later additions of microphones and photovoltaic sensors and cathode receiver tubes resulted in radio and television. From these analog production and distribution technologies of the Industrial Era arose the theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices that are now colloquially known as the Mass Media. Their industries globally generate US$3 trillion in gross revenues annually. The Present Since the mid-1990s, the Mass Media industries have created online versions of their Industrial Era products and services ‘converged’ into multimedia websites or ‘streaming’ services. The industries hoped that consumers and advertisers would utilize the websites the same way (i.e., as often and thoroughly) as consumers had printed products or broadcast services during the 20th Century. The industries hoped that the same Industrial Era business models would […]