The slow death of old new media
You have seen me here reporting about death of the TV a lot - a topic which I follow closely as it affects me personally and would be of such benefit to human society - but putting personal feelings aside - TV seems not the only one last century medium that slowly dies - at stake seem to be ALL of them. Cinema, Radio, TV, Newspapers - all in the process of loosing their market power and being replaced by some or other web enabled variant. First of all comes an article from roblimo from slashdot trying to shed light on what are newspapers doing wrong with some handy number of how bad the newspaper market really looks. The San Francisco Chronicle has lost 16.4% of its dead tree readership in the last year alone! The example that he is picking to show the world what newspapers are doing wrong - the very local Bradenton Herald - lost 3.5% in the same last year. He tells them - get to the web and get the webcontent more up to date - print a collection of all webarticles at one a clock and send them off to the few who still prefer dead trees in their houses. Also engage your readers in open communication - take advise from them and let them correct what needs to be corrected as in slashdots own service.
This was yesterday.
Today I stumble across two other articles. First one via delicios future tag that tells us how bad german cinemas did this year - a steady decline since four years now by the way - with last years beeing better because of some very good films but over the last four years a steady decline. So year over year they lost 20,2% of their visitors. The Tagesschau blames it not only on bad movies (so I do blame it a lot on those) but also on file sharing and home theaters. Someone disputed my claim that cinemas are dying on VJCentral I couldnīt dig up the proof back then - well here it is - it canīt get more apparent. Even the very bad for cinemas year 2003 was much better then this one.
So whats left? Radio. Well podcasts, downloadable music in unseen quantities, sharing swapping downloading creative commons, community radios, internet streams compared to a constant bombardment of chart music mixed with commercials straight from the crypt - I never thought how much this could impact radio - myself an avid radio listener. Apparently it seems hard to really measure the actual radio listeners (compared to the quotas) but at a recent Reuters Media and Advertising Summit advertising executives are talking about radio as if it was already dead. A mixture of new technology and bad bad programming (and I guess its even more true in the states) is leading to the black box six feet under for radio stations at an immense rate.
What gives? Its not only the net that prompts those developments for the old last century media - its also bad programming and bad planning - the net speeds up the process by giving an alternative - interestingly enough the net also has the power to overthrow the media conglomerates at the same time by giving everyone a voice, a canvas, a antenna and a roll of film. Artists, writers actors, moderators, creative people rejoice - its time to start reshaping the media. Diversity and almost unlimited amounts of views and content will bring us closer together and let us advance and develop a greater understanding for each other - religion, politics, believes, technology - the bidirectional communication approach of the net enables us for the first time since smoke signs and drum chains to unfiltered uncontrolled global thought exchange.
If it wouldnīt be for the powers that be that would like to stop this from happening and there I need to throw some more salt into the sweet soup. A lawsuit in germany against the heise Verlag states that they are responsible for everything written in the comment section on their online publications - means they need to censor their own readers if there is any questionable content - and you thought we live in a free speech world... The other one is as serious. Someone in the open online encyclopedia Wikipedia was altering an article on John Seigenthaler that accused him of having his part on the assassination of the Kennedy brothers John F. and Bob. Even so in America a lawsuit against the parent company seems not to happen the wikipedia administration has closed the ability to create new articles or alter older ones for everyone not registered - a real setback for the wiki revolution and the bidirectional web.
The struggle for both sides will continue - the free open side and the old "we donīt want to move into a new information society were everything can be said always". The powers that are will challenge the powers that be as it always happened and I suggest that we might even see dead people over this sooner or later - the capital just doesnīt want to loose control of their slaves.