transformed media landscape - and how we can make best use of it

Transformed media

lansdcapeAnd how can we make

the best use of it

What is technological change?Can we follow it? Shape it?Can we fully understand its

consequences?

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment

Corp., 1977.

“Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.”

Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948.

„There is no chance the iPhone is going to get any significant market

share. No chance.” Steve Balmer, Microsoft CEO 2007

One of the problems of writing, and working, and looking at the Internet is that it's very hard to separate fashion from deep change.

…but

„It is too soon to say.” Zhou Enlai, asked about

his opinion on the French Revolution

The media landscape that we knew – of professionals broadcasting messages to amateurs is gone

Transformed media lanscape

• the internet as a first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversations at the same time;

• media is increasingly social; • innovation is happening widely;• groups can gather around media and content;• many-to-many pattern;• consumers become producers.

Mass-self communicationManuel Castells

A new form of communication : • based on interactive horizontal networks that

convey messages from many to many, from local to global to local, in real time or chosen time

• communication power is diffused through society and becomes a personal tool for everybody with access to the Internet.

• with the development of social software tools, the so-called Web 2.0 has constituted a new form of civil society

• because of the connection to wireless communication and its ubiquitous power of communication, under the new system of communication, images, sounds, news and ideas diffuse as fire in the prairie before any deliberate control can stop it.

/example/

Commons based peer productionYochai Benkler

• a new model of economic production• the creative energy of large numbers of

people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical organization

• often without financial compensation.

1. Web 2.0

• From portal to platform• From passive consumption to participation

and creation• Always on, real time communication• End-to-end principle• Tim O’Reilly: harnessing collective intelligence

2. Amateur production

• Easy access to tools enabling creation• New possibilities of sharing content• Gift economy / DYI culture• Examples:

• OpenStreetMap• Citizen Science• Publiclaboratory.org

Map: OpenStreetmap, CC BY-SA

3. Smart mobs

• N30 protest in Seattle, 1999• Howard Rheingold: a group that behaves

intelligently or efficiently because of network links to information and others

• Adhocracy (Toffler, Doctorow): rule based, ephemeral associations that “capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results”

4. Crowdsourcing

„One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects.”

Clay Shirky

5. Long tail

"We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”

Amazon employee

„ A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society than one where citizens approach media as mere consumers”

Clay Shirky

As organizations move toward the new collaborative model, institutions are going to come under increasing pressure and the more rigidly managed and the more they rely on information monopolies, the more pressure they will be under.

Conversely, loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage. The more those groups forgo traditional institutional imperatives like deciding in advance what’s going to happen and the profit motive, the more leverage they will have.