The Democratization of the Media Redux

Public Service Announcement: I have recently rediscovered SnipURL.com, a wonderful zero price utility on the web for creating persistent, shortened URLs for referencing in such places like this blog. You will see that I will primarily link (especially to news articles that disappear days later) to SnipURL links--do not be decieved, this is merely an efficient archiving tool, and one I highly recommend.

Now on to today's ruminations.

Blogging entered the average American's vernacular during the 2004 Presidential Election, when astute observers of the political scene stood up to the so-called "Old Media" and took down Dan Rather in the now infamous Memogate Scandal. This was a significant event in American political history, but it seems to have also been a mere flash in the pan. So it shall remain for the time being. The other day, I embarked on writing a blog post about MySpace's interaction with politics. I might get to finishing that today or tomorrow, if I am lucky, but it warrants such significant considerations that it may just remain a "draft" in my blogger post history. With the Internet, it isn't true that "what is here today is gone tomorrow," but it certainly is true that "what is here today will be irrelevant tomorrow."

The impact of blogging on American politics in 2004 was significant in a certain sense, but negligible in the sense that it likely didn't affect the outcome. But Web phenomena are having radical affects on the habits and propensities of Americans when it comes to their entertainment. YouTube and MySpace are the precursors to something truly mammoth that is yet to come. They are the pioneers in the Internet entertainment marketplace in that they have taken something that people have tried to do successfully in the past and have actually made it successful. But they haven't yet made it profitable. That will be the true success story of Internet Entertainment---or, I suppose henceforth, I will call it Intertainment, because I am lazy. The Wright Brothers took the age-old dream of the Flying Machine and made it a reality--American Airlines made money doing it.

This same cycle will repeat itself on the Internet, and in Intertainment. We are starting to see the Democratization of Entertainment--the fruits of which are Intertainment. This New York Times article encapsulates this phenomenon quite well:


http://snipurl.com/tmq9

It is always thought that Big Business will be the best equipped to profit from new phenomenon. I would so fervently challenge that thesis as to perhaps make a fool of myself, were it not for the facts being squarely in my corner on this one.

The profiteer of the Massification of Retail was not Woolworth, but Walton. The profiteer of Internet Search was not AltaVista, but Google. TimeWarner has no more profited from owning AOL than Rupert Murdoch has profited from owning MySpace. The ideas are good in theory, but they don't work themselves out so well in reality. Perhaps that is because of a lack of innovative culture at those acquiring corporations. Or maybe it is because "me too" is simply no way of doing business--it has to be "me better."

The movie studios have monopolized mass entertainment for the better part of 7 decades, but that is slipping. But it is not slipping because somebody else is taking over mass entertainment; it is slipping because there is decreasingly such a thing as mass entertainment. There is micro-entertainment on a massive scale. It is the person, or company, who first figures out how to monetize this phenomenon who will be the next Wal-Mart or the next Google, but more likely a hybrid of the two. Wal-Mart figured out how to sell more of more to most people, and Google has figured out how to sell a little something to everybody. That combination will be impenetrable--for a week or so at least.

To harness the collective talents of the world's billions is an undertaking that only recently could have been possible. But in a world where every man can be an actor, every woman a director, and every Net user a viewer and critic, the profit potential is unfathomable.

I look forward with great anticipation to the social upheavel that is on the horizon because of Intertainment. The next casualty of the Net will be Education--and then Politics. Somebody will profit from all of them, but it will require bold creativity, a challenge to every assumption that currently pervades these arenas, and a commitment to weather the storms that always accompany creative destruction.