When I write that this is a time of rapid and painful transformation in the mass media, one may understandably glance over at the New York Times' stock price, shrug, and say: tell me something I don't know.
And if I made the further case that this period of change would have ramifications far beyond the merely information-based industries, one's eyes might forgivably roll toward a snapshot of the full Dow Jones Industrial Average, and tune me out.
Indeed, one could point out that everyone knows that much has changed in the past decade and even since the Internet first went commercial. Another contributing factor is globalization as it is broadly understood; the two have worked in tandem to "flatten" the world, as Tom Friedman (often) tells us.
That much is uncontroversial. I am interested in the second- and third-order effects that are not always apparent or not always polite to discuss. If Tower Records still existed in brick and mortar, I might call the printed newspaper the canary in the coal mine. Instead, your local daily may be more like the unfortunate miner tasked with retrieving the poor bird.
Let's start with the still-not-terribly-controversial assumption that the Internet creates new efficiencies which lower the cost of doing business and cut out middlemen of all kinds (even those who never thought of themselves as such) while letting new players into a given market. These new players always perform essentially the same task or build a reasonable facsimile of an existing product for less, and often in a way that fundamentally changes the user's experience. We can see this on a micro level, where small-scale travel agencies find themselves out of business, superseded by that one Gnome-fronted website.
Now let's zoom out and look at this across industries, across continents and across time. What does a society affected by these trends look like at the macro level? Although I realize I am making a rather big assumptive leap, I wonder if it is any surprise that many longstanding industries are entering a world of pain.
Transformed labor and information systems are taking power away from yesterday’s leaders and giving it to tomorrow's upstarts. Only they are not as powerful as their predecessors. There is more competition, and often there is less money. For good or ill, the Internet is lowering the price of everything. The consequences cannot be fully appreciated at present and will not be clear for who-knows-how-long. Nearly every area of human endeavor — and perhaps, yes, every — is affected by this.
In the meantime, what does this mean for us? How do we cope? How do we thrive? What should we keep and what should we let go? Where is the point at which these forces are met with equal and opposite forces? What forces might those be? And what, exactly, becomes of the middlemen?
Call it semi-creative destruction.
Or use the term I've settled upon: churn. It's one that will be familiar to economists and sociologists (for what it's worth, I am neither, unless modified with the adjective "armchair") as having several definitions related to disruptive but inevitable change. For illustrative purposes, let us turn to the article "Churn" on Wikipedia as it currently exists:
Used as a verb, churn refers not only to the use of such a machine, but also to extended metaphorical connotations, including: 1) a sense of continual labored stirring or cranking (the wheel of time churns on), 2) roiling, stirring up, digging up, agitating, or offending (scandal churned up the once quiet community), and 3) continually producing or replacing (churned out a new novel every month; churned his investment portfolio to generate commissions).
The term is primarily a neutral one, and though it does occasionally carry negative connotations, I intend no such connotation here. Just as I do not see technology as good or a bad but rather a neutral instrument which may be put to either end, I mean for this not-so-neo-logism to describe a global marketplace with many players, none of whom are pulling the strings — or in any case, no more than a few such strings out of the millions of strings at any given time — so anything which could be described as "good" or "bad" is mostly relative to one's vantage point.
Quite obviously it is less desirable to be working your way upward in a declining industry, let alone at a time of recession. But even in emerging industries, it is not quite so obvious that things are more complicated than the Internet triumphalists have projected. This is most apparent right now in the news industry, where the decline in print advertising revenues is hardly made up by online ad revenues.
While it's very easy to point at micro-level to manifestations of this change — Time and Newsweek's shift away from reported news, the precarious position of DVDs and successor format Blu-Ray, a proposed end to Saturday postal delivery — it can be difficult to describe what is happening on the macro level.
Still, I think that a handful of trends are bleedingly obvious. Consider these very large umbrellas under which many micro trends may be grouped, even as these examples may themselves be mutually interdependent:
- Tangible objects are being replaced, where possible, by digital versions that accomplish similar tasks.
- Old business models and old ways of doing things have collapsed or are collapsing.
- Standards of considered human behavior are shifting: from privacy to transparency and authenticity to accessibility, among others.
This is no manifesto. I have no answers and no formal questions at this point. In lieu of an adequate conclusion — if it's not obvious, this post is intended as the first in a possible series — I'd like to throw a few questions out there: Are there any trends I'm missing? Is there a better way to organize them? Are there forests I'm missing for the trees that haven't been cut down to create paper versions of these ruminations?
I look forward to your responses, and I'll see you in the comments.