So…have you been blown away by the new media revolution?? Neither have I. In fact, there’s really not all that much ‘new’ about New Media. Delivering a commercial to me as a pre-roll to an online video stream is not ‘new’. Sorry. Banner ads are certainly not new either. Sorry. Rich media? Again, not new. Animation dates back to the early 1800s with ‘flip books’. Sorry.
There’s nothing new about online media. Oh, sure, the delivery is new, but the media itself hasn’t changed any. And the control hasn’t yet shifted from the few to the many. The internet has not been the liberator of media. In fact, the threat of what the internet & internet media could be has scared the you-know-what out of those in control of “old media” so much that the backlash of lawsuits (ahem..RIAA, are you listening) has just become a farce, a circus, a comedy of errors. The only problem is that no one is laughing.
The ‘old media moguls’ are akin to the blacksmith in the early 1900s, who upon seeing the automobile, decided to try to pass law saying the automobile should not be allowed on the road with horses & people and control it proliferation and how it could be used by the general populace. And they then hire a great law team who goes on to show how dangerous these new automobiles are and how the increase in pedestrian deaths is enough to pass these laws. For example, in England, it was once law that you had to have a pedestrian walk in front of your car waving a red flag and blowing a horn to warn everyone that a car was coming. It was a law that was repealed in short order. It impeded the progress of civilization by limiting the use of the technology at hand. A meme that seems to be cyclic in history.
The problem is lack of vision. Rather than seeing the advent of new technology as a boon to civilization and a chance to make money in an entirely new market, the blacksmith simply can’t get past the fear that his livelihood is in jeopardy. With people buying automobiles there will be fewer horses on the roads. Fewer horses on the roads means less need for new horseshoes. This is a rather short-sided view of life and is usually the direct result of a business model that has no extensibility or leadership that has no vision, even for those things right in front of their faces.
And what’s all this “research says x% of people under y watch online video”, or whatever the technology du jour is. Why do we rely on the general populace to ferret out where everything is going. Are they not just taking advantage of what’s here, now. If they were so good at defining the future of technology, wouldn’t they all be millionaires. It was Henry Ford who once said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’ ”
My advice to the blacksmiths of today: learn to make tires.
The world wide web has leveled the playing field in so many ways for individuals & companies. You no longer need a 6 figure budget to market worldwide. You no longer need to spend thousands to connect a group of like-minded people. You no longer need to be a designer or programmer to develop a digital experience for hundreds, thousands or even millions of potential users. Oops! Maybe that last one isn’t a good thing.