From the perspective of mobility, the automobile is the mass-customization post-industrial technology. Railroads are industrial transportation -- they follow specific fixed paths and travel on time schedules -- they efficiently move large numbers of people at once from a particular place to another particular place. Railroads helped define where cities would develop and how they would thrive.
By contrast the automobile allows a single individual to choose his or her own destination, route and time of travel. The rise of the automobile over the last 75 years has slowly brought about the transformation (if not death) of the railroad, suburbanism which has eroded the importance of cities, and of course free love...
When considering the coming impact of the Internet on mass media, there is a lot for us to learn in looking at the history of the automobile and how it transformed particular aspects of our industrial society in unexpected ways. Where the automobile brought mass customization to mobility, the Internet is bringing mass customization to our media experience.
Revolutionaries and Conservatives
The problem with revolutionaries is that they believe that they can see the future that is coming and, seeing it so clearly themselves, they are then impatient for their vision to become a reality. Look at Marx. Go reread Das Kapital. You'll be surprised at the degree to which Marx's ideas are commonly accepted by our society today, 150 years later.
The problem with conservatives is their visceral reaction to the impatience of the revolutionaries (and to the language these revolutionaries use). Certainly they have a status quo to defend. But it becomes especially easy to reject all aspects of the future vision when the revolutionaries insist that the coming change is imminent. And when the revolutionaries use incendiary language... How ridiculous to think that the world will simply change tomorrow! The calmer of this group may say "sure change is coming, we just don't know when." The most reactionary will claim that the revolutionaries are wrong about everything, since they are so clearly wrong about the timing (and their approach).
The human experience of change indicates that both of these extremes are rarely correct. Change occurs more gradually then we expect but also affects us in surprising ways. It would have been hard, for example, to have predicted the role in the "sexual revolution" that many thinkers now ascribe to the automobile.
Paradigm Shift
One of the places to look for fractures between the visions of revolutionaries and the reactions of conservatives is in the way in which they frame the subject of their concern. Recognizing the inherent contradictions in the way that entrenched practitioners think about their area of speciality and the way in which newcomers approach the same issues can provide a lens through which the impending change may be understood.
Thomas Kuhn (in his book Structure of Scientific Revolutions) called these changes "paradigm shifts" -- the process through which scientists move from disdain through doubt to acceptance of new scientific theories. This same sort of paradigm shift occurs outside the scientific realm, anytime a group of specialists debates the way in which their field is changing. Where scientific theories are typically explanation of physical phenomena that do not in themselves change -- our understanding of them changes (hopefully improves) -- the paradigm shifts I am talking about here are changing understanding of social phenomena -- that DO change, necessitating the changes in our understanding.
Destinations vs. Journeys
To carry forward the idea of mobility, one way of understanding the difference today between the entrenched practitioners of mass media, and the revolutionaries pounding on the doors of the establishment is to think about travel as a metaphor for media. While any metaphor breaks down at some point, they are useful because they provide frameworks for thinking about issues and ideas.
Consider the traditional media practitioner's approach to the value of content. An element of content, whether an article, a song, or a movie, is a destination. The content is valuable in itself. It needs to be locked up behind gates (copyright) so that a toll can be collected from visitors. Destinations have unique value - they are not commodities.
Contrast the view of content as a destination with that of the media revolutionary. Each individual element of content is merely one vista, one landmark, one roadhouse along the way. What is important is not the destination but the journey. Content should not be locked up, it should be distributed as broadly as possible, in order to influence travelers, not capture visitors.
Of course neither of these views is perfect. And a source of conflict between the revolutionaries and the reactionaries is that both sides would like their vision of media to be pure. But content consumers have always been travelers -- there has always been an element of influencing the traveler in each destination that old media presented to a visitor. And will always be an element of being a destination in the content vistas that new media offers to passing traveler, intent on influencing their journeys.
But it is in understanding the weight of destination vs. journey that we can appreciate the subtle transformation that media is undergoing in this post-industrial age. Back now to the automobile.
Mass customization of mobility
The railroad, like the printing press, created a logic of a certain kind of network. Centralized organization, planned distribution, and usage patterns that caused people, goods, and information to follow certain proscribed patterns. The railroad reinforced and supported the industrial age urge to collect ourselves into urban centers. Within the city rail transportation could be economically provided to move citizens from home to market to workplace. Between cities, rails could efficiently and swiftly move goods and people (and information) on fixed schedules. Cities with rail stations grew prosperous and those without disappeared. The railway station became so important that it established the very definition of time in early industrial society as people had to adjust themselves to the schedule of trains coming and going from their town.
The emergence of the automobile in the early twentieth century, and its acceleration after World War II transformed our expectations of mobility and the very fabric of our society. Automobiles allow people to live further from markets and jobs. As a result, suburban neighborhoods develop around urban areas, sapping cities of taxes and jobs. Larger and more efficient stores evolve, destroying smaller individually owned and operated stores. Ironically mass customization of mobility lead, in many cases, to an increase in the industrialization (or at least centralization) of other aspects of our society.
The lesson here is that emergent technologies tend to impact society in ways that create greater market efficiencies. Wal Mart is successful because their model allows good to be provided at a much lower cost to citizens than the corner store. Wal Mart exists, in part, because the automobile allows citizens to travel greater distances to centralized distribution facilities to obtain the packaged good they require for daily life.
Mass customization of media
The Internet is changing patterns of consumption, much as the automobile did. Consumers can now obtain whatever content they wish, at whatever time they wish. While mass media provided railroad like efficiencies for its day in delivering people to specific content destinations, increasingly the Internet is being used for journeys that are personalized in ways that mass media could never afford to provide.
In this mass customized media world, new market efficiencies will emerge and erode the value of existing institutions, while creating new opportunities. The erosion in the cost of distribution and the physical territory that a given media outlet can reach, for example, tends to take value away from the physical assets of printing presses, trucks and newsstands. However, it creates the possibility of identifying a geographically diverse group of consumers interested in a specific topic, and allows for an economical production and distribution model to evolve. The result in this case will be more targeted media products that deliver greater value for niche markets.
The Wal Mart of the media space will almost certainly be advertising networks -- Google's AdSense for example. In the new distributed publishing world, the business of selling advertising can be centralized because it is so inexpensive to distribute the results of these sales to each individual (down to the individual consumer). Just as with the automobile, mass customization will mean that certain aspects of our society will become more centralized.
Where Should Mass Media Go?
There are a number of business models available to publishers, the recording industry, and Hollywood. And there is time for these companies to make the transition, if they grasp the opportunity. There will be a period during which media consumers still behave in the old ways, follow the old railroad tracks to the city centers, even though they now have cars that allow them to disperse into suburban neighborhoods. Companies can utilize the advantages that they have created in the old media economy to create positions of value in the new media economy.
But it is important to identify and invest in the specific aspect of the new media model where a given specific company can build its new advantages. Is the advantage in having a deep and specific expertise such that the company can become a topical authority and derive value from that position? Or is it an understanding of and a relationship with a specific audience that allows your company to bring a variety of products to the attention of that audience, thus deriving value from the position as "guide" for those journeys? Or can your company create value in a segment of newly centralized components of the value chain -- aggregating advertising for example -- such that new economies of scale are realized. Economies that support a mass customized consumption.
These are the decisions that are ahead for media reactionaries and revolutionaries alike. While it is unlikely that the media landscape will be entirely changed by the time we awaken tomorrow morning, it is also unlikely to take the 50 years it took from the introduction of the automobile to the summer of love...
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