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The age of permanent Net revolution

John Naughton

IT IS amazing how quickly we take things for granted. Think back to 1993. John Major was the U.K.'s Prime Minister, Tony Blair still looked like Bambi and Bill Clinton had just become President of the United States. Only grown-ups had mobile phones, no one outside of academic and research labs had an email address, and a URL — now that was something exotic! Amazon was a river, eBay and iPod were typos, and there were quaint little shops on the high street called "travel agents."

Why pick that year? Because 1993 was when the world wide web took off.

Today, 13 years on, nobody knows how big the web is. When it stopped publishing the number, Google was claiming to index eight billion pages, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Some experts estimate that the web is 400 times bigger than that. So a publication medium that contains more than 3,000 billion pages has come into being in little over a decade, and it is growing by maybe 25,000 pages an hour. This is a revolutionary transformation of our environment by any standards. We need a way of thinking about what it means.

The conventional approach involves what computer scientist John Seely Brown calls "endism" — the perspective that sees new technologies as replacing older ones. Thus when the CD-rom arrived, people predicted the demise of the printed book; television meant the end of radio and movies; TV news the end of newspapers. And so on.

None of these extinctions came to pass. But although the CD-rom did not exterminate the book, it did change forever the prospects for expensive reference works. (Remember Encyclopedia Britannica?) So the interactions between new and old media are complex. That is what led cultural critic Neil Postman to propose the notion of media ecology. The idea is borrowed from science: an ecosystem is defined as a dynamic system in which living organisms interact with one another and with their environment. These interactions can be very complex and take many forms. Organisms prey on one another; compete for nutrients; have parasitic or symbiotic relationships; wax and wane; prosper and decline. And an ecosystem is never static; it is in a state of perpetual ferment.

For most of our lives, the dominant organism was broadcast TV. Note that "broadcast" implies few-to-many: a relatively small number of broadcasters, transmitting content to billions of essentially passive viewers and listeners. This ecosystem is the media environment in which most of us grew up. But it is in the process of radical change because broadcast TV is in inexorable decline; its audience is fragmenting.

Trouble from within

Broadcast TV is being eaten from within, by narrowcast digital television — in which specialist content is aimed at subscription-based audiences and distributed via digital channels. But waiting in the wings is something even more devastating — Internet Protocol TV (IPtv) — television on demand, delivered via the Internet. And it is coming soon to a computer screen near you.

The trouble for broadcast TV is that its business model depended on attracting mass audiences. Once audiences fragment, the commercial logic changes. And new technologies such as personal video recorders (PVRs), which use hard drives rather than tape, enable viewers to determine their own viewing schedules and (more significantly) to avoid ads.

As the CEO of Yahoo! said recently at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the era of "appointment-to-view" TV is coming to an end. This does not mean that broadcast TV will disappear, incidentally.

That is not the way ecologists think. It will continue to exist for the simple reason that some things are best covered using a few-to-many technology. Only a broadcast model could deal with something like, say, a World Cup final.

But it will lose its dominant position in the ecosystem, with profound consequences for us all.

The Internet will take its place. Note that I do not say the web. The biggest mistake people in the media business make is to think that the Net and the web are synonymous. They are not. The web is enormous, but it is just one kind of traffic that runs on the Internet's tracks and signalling.

And already it is being overtaken by other kinds of traffic. According to data gathered by the Cambridge firm Cachelogic, peer-to-peer networking traffic now exceeds web traffic by a factor of between two and 10, depending on the time of day.

Dictated by the Net

These developments illustrate the extent to which the Internet is becoming central to our lives. The next generation will live in an environment dominated by the Net. What will that mean for us — and for them?

In thinking about the future, the most useful words are "push" and "pull" — they capture the essence of where we have been and where we are headed. Broadcast TV is a "push" medium: a select band of producers (broadcasters) decide what content is to be created, create it and then push it down analogue or digital channels at audiences which are assumed to consist of essentially passive recipients. The couch potato was, par excellence, a creature of this world.

The web is the opposite of this. It is a "pull" medium. Nothing comes to you unless you choose it and click on it to pull it down on to your computer. You are in charge.

Another implication is that the asymmetry of the old push-media world is being overturned. The underlying assumption of the old broadcast model was that audiences were passive and uncreative. What we are now discovering is that that passivity may have been more due to the absence of tools and publication opportunities than to intrinsic defects in human nature.

Take blogging — the practice of keeping an online diary. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, currently claims to be monitoring nearly 29 million. New blogs are being created at the rate of about one a second. Many of them are merely vanity publishing with no discernible literary or intellectual merit, but something like 13 million are still being updated three months after their initial creation, and many contain writing and thinking of a very high order.

What the blogging phenomenon suggests is that the traffic in ideas and cultural products isn't a one-way street — as it was in the old push-media ecology. People have always been thoughtful, articulate and well-informed, but until now few of them ever made it past the gatekeepers who controlled access to publication media. Blogging software and the Internet gave them the platform they needed, and they have grasped the opportunity.

The other remarkable explosion of creativity comes from digital photography. Every day, millions of photographs are taken, but until recently an understandable response would have been "so what?" But Flickr.com allows people to upload their pictures and display them on the web, each neatly resized and allocated its own unique URL. And it has grown like crazy. The most fascinating aspect of it is that users can attach tags to their pictures, and these tags can be used to search the entire database. I looked for photographs tagged with "Ireland" and came up with 122,000 images! They were mostly holiday and casual snapshots, but here and there were some truly beautiful images. Ten years ago, those snapshots would have wound up in shoeboxes, but now they can be — and are being — published, shared with others, made available to the world.

And this is something new. It shows that our media ecology has changed out of all recognition already. And my guess is that it is just the beginning. We ain't seen nothin' yet. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

(Adapted from the U.K. Marketing Society's Annual Lecture, delivered at the Science Museum, London, on February 28.)

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