I just wrote a post on digital pioneer and futurist Mark Pesce’s views on the end of broadcasting and the mass media as we know it.
Television broadcasting is probably a dinosaur facing extinction, but let’s remember a bit of pre-history here: dinosaurs didn’t die off in an instant. No time lord zapped them with some mighty extincter machine. Their decline and eventual extinction was, it is believed, a slow and gradual process.
So it will be with broadcasting. Even if their distribution and revenue models are now undermined and will soon be obsolete, conventional broadcasting (as we know it) will continue to operate and try to compete, at least for a few years. And in the less developed countries with emerging economies, that process will take longer.
Which means we still have to engage TV broadcasters even as their Empires of Eyeball slowly crumble.
And let’s not write off those Empires just yet. I still remember an article in the early days of Wired magazine: appearing in Sep-Oct 1993 issue, it was titled Mediasaurus , and written by the well known science fiction author (and medical doctor) Michael Crichton (of Jurassic Park and ER fame).
He started the article as:
I am the author of a novel about dinosaurs, a novel about US-Japanese trade relations, and a forthcoming novel about sexual harassment – what some people have called my dinosaur trilogy. But I want to focus on another dinosaur, one that may be on the road to extinction. I am referring to the American media. And I use the term extinction literally. To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace.
And he ended:
So I hope that this era of polarized, junk-food journalism will soon come to an end. For too long the media have accepted the immortal advice of Yogi Berra, who said: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” But business as usual no longer serves the audience. And although technology will soon precipitate enormous changes in the media, we face a more immediate problem: a period of major social change. We are going to need a sensitive, informed, and responsive media to accomplish those changes. And that’s the way it is.
I just re-read the full article, and Crichton’s analysis is even more valid today than when it was written over a dozen years ago. But it’s also true that the broadcast industry – and conventional media as a whole – have changed and adapted.
No doubt that Mediasaurus still has an expiry date, but it’s not easy trying to guess exactly when the last of their kind drops dead.
Open Minds! 