“The internet is a copy machine,” Kevin Kelly says in “Better than Free“ an essay in which he paints the net as a “super-distribution system.” It churns out copies so “super abundant they become worthless.” Kelly advises creative people to invent new ways to make money because it is no longer possible to charge for content.
But Kelly is only half right. Sure the net is a copier. But he overlooks the more revolutionary trait that will work to our advantage as communicators – the net is interactive. It restores the feedback between audience and author that we used to enjoy back when stories were told around the camp fire.
That feedback loop went missing about six hundred years ago. Blame Gutenberg. He mass produced thought and packaged it in books. They diffused knowledge more efficiently than dispatching story tellers hither and yon.
But something was lost in the leap from oral to print. The oral story was interactive. If the audience seemed puzzled the story teller rephrased the tale. Print was practically set in stone. It never paused to look for comprehension. Print told only one version of the story and it always flowed one way. About a century ago broadcast untethered stories from literacy. Knowledge radiated even more widelybut it still flowed just one-way.
And that’s the way it was.
Looking at today’s internet you’d never guess interactivity had staged a comeback. Today’s internet has bolted-on some interactive features – viewers can comment on stories or vote in informal polls. These tactics seem reminicent of early television when announcers cupped one hand behind their ear for better acoustics – realizing how silly they looked.
What would an interactive publication look like? OhMyNews, the South Korea citizen journalism phenomenon, may be the best example. About 20 percent of its content is produced by professionals. The rest is citizen-generated. It was founded in 2000 and is thought to have swayed the 2006 South Korean presidential race.
Yes, the Internet is a copying and distribution engine. It is destroying jobs and rewiring industries. But the more pregnant change has yet to be realized. For more than 600 years the author and the audience have been sundered. Now the audience is coming back into view. We can see them just beyond the circle of flames. How do we catch their eyes and entice them to stay? That the question will preoccupy the 21st Century publisher.
I totally agree — but this is a lot bigger than just media. One of the things that I have been thinking about is “pre-industrial” vs. “industrial” vs. “post-industrial” marketing. I think the same thinking can be applied to the media point you are raising. In pre-industrial markets (e.g. for thousands of years as we evolved civilization) our interactions were based on trust, reputation, word of mouth from peers, social networks… then the industrial era came along, mass production, mass media, etc — mass messaging — and we became disconnected from the tribal behavior of social interaction around news and markets. Now electronic communication is returning us to our roots — but with the barriers of space and time removed.
Ted, come to mention it, I’m pretty sure you told me as much in one of our F2F conversations and seeing it here, I guess most ever industry/institution is being hit by the same disruption. I imagine a pyramid on the left, representing the old order, and a network cloud on the right symbolizing the new. And all the pyramids are sort of deflating like so many failed souffles. Messy.
Tom,
I think you are missing the point re interactivity. You say
The interactivity is that when I don’t like your story, I can publish my own commentary, criticism, or alternate story — on a blog, social network, or even twitter. We are all (mini) publishers now. That is the interactivity.
BTW, Kevin Kelley has a new and very good article that I think is must reading for would be MiniMedia publishers – see http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php
[...] wrapped up with the unwelcome elements cited above: we can adopt a new approach to journalism that takes advantage of the interactivity of the World Wide Web to do what storytellers haven’t been able do since Gutenberg’s [...]
[...] help the audience react to the news. The Web is an interactive medium. The audience is not passive. Professionals must get interactive or get left [...]
[...] a New Agey concept but one that news media and other traditional communicators must embrace because interactivity is the message of the Internet — it’s feedback that makes today and the future different from everything since [...]
[...] wrapped up with the unwelcome elements cited above: we can adopt a new approach to journalism that takes advantage of the interactivity of the World Wide Web to do what storytellers haven’t been able do since Gutenberg’s day — [...]