Category: Culture

Why do progressives still love the new oligarchy?

Ever since I began paying attention to issues related to the digital age, I have been scratching my head as to why, of all people, it is political progressives who revere Big Tech, even while appropriately mistrusting just about all other powerful, corporate interests.  Why the most powerful of powerful gets a free pass is something of a mystery, but perhaps more stories like this one from The Daily Beast will help.  I understand many view the internet and social media as an extension of themselves, but this psychological phenomenon is precisely how an oligarchy can get away with just about anything — by convincing the public that it’s all for the greater good.

“Today’s tech moguls don’t employ many Americans, they don’t pay very much in taxes or tend to share much of their wealth, and they live in a separate world that few of us could ever hope to enter.”

See article at The Daily Beast.

Major Publishers Aim to Compete with TV

I remember telling a corporate client years ago that over time websites would begin to be treated as niche TV channels. Video communications would complement or replace written word content, and static websites would give way first to the opportunity and later to a demand to program new material on a regular basis.  Of course, I was trying to sell this client production services, but I did believe what I was saying would come to pass for many entities.  Today, video on the web has obviously expanded dramatically although it is still in its relative infancy.  For many viewers there is now little distinction between TV viewing and WebTV viewing, and the younger the audience, the more viewing tends to be web only and on devices other than television monitors.

In this recent article on PaidContent, Jeff Roberts reports on traditional print publications trying to figure out the formula for successful use of video on the web.  Highlighting the Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast, Roberts discusses the prospect of these major brands taking a bite out of the rich advertising pie that historically belongs solely to television. These publishers hope to attract sponsors on the strength of their brands and are investing in new video programs and hiring production professionals to grow marketshare in this space.

On the one hand, as prefaced, this is an inevitable development now that streaming video is high quality and digital production is an affordable add-on to a media organization like a magazine or newspaper.  In principle, an in-house staff of fewer than five people can produce a steady stream of solid video entertainment or news content.  And if the programming complements the brand, then viewership should increase and sponsors will follow.  The right mix, however, is essential, and I suspect it will be inherently harder for some producers than others to grow a whole new appendage into the world of television production.

It’s pretty easy to imagine a loyal reader of the WSJ becoming an equally loyal viewer of its videos. The WSJ provides a very specific type of content for a well-defined audience, one that likely considers consumption of its daily fare a necessity more than a luxury.  But the more video content can be described as optional entertainment/information, the more competition it has — not just with similar TV programming, but with EVERYTHING.

It is already well understood that competition for consumer attention is now geometric.  Any bit of content, from a multi-million-dollar TV series to a blog to a meme, vies for “eyeballs,” as the marketing wonks say, on a theoretically even playing field in a world of devices that are always on and connected. In short, because distribution of nearly everything is nearly everywhere, all media compete 24/7 for any prospective viewer’s still-limited time. And, of course, as volume increases, as more brands produce more content, the competition for viewer time increases as well. What has always been true will remain true — the most popular stuff will win, and the less popular stuff will disappear. That said, in the digital age, popularity can be very fleeting, and this is not how brands build relationships with customers.

In theory, content doesn’t have to be as popular on the web as it traditionally does on television.  1,000 legitimate customers of a sponsor are more valuable than 10,000 viewers who will never be customers, and in principle, branded, online entertainment helps sponsors connect with those legitimate customers and even occasionally sell to them via point-of-purchase opportunities. Done right, web-based entertainment eliminates some of the waste in traditional TV advertising, but this concept is also why a great deal of branded entertainment is occasionally just this side of an infomercial.  Harkening back to the earliest days of single-sponsor television shows, branded online video often features the sponsoring brand or products as a subject or character within the program itself. This can be a tough needle to thread in the hope of attracting an audience that wants to be entertained and not sold.  Hence, one of the most popular formats for branded online video is the news-magazine.  This format is cheap and fast to produce, and the non-fiction content easily suits certain sponsors without creating a disconnect for the viewer.  For instance, it feels perfectly natural for Nike to sponsor a news-magazine series profiling athletes.

With the right combination of elements, branded entertainment can be a perfect opportunity for some clever production people, the newly developed network, and the sponsors; but as the overall market divides, replicates, and expands, I suspect getting that combination right will be trickier simply because the market becomes so saturated that brands are competing for incrementally less available attention from their prospective customers.  At the same time, both viewing habits and the technologies used to consume media are dynamic; and these factors actually dictate the style, format, and length of programming.  If the viewer is on his couch at home, a full-length show might be what he wants to see, but if he’s killing 20 minutes during a lunch break, he might be more inclined to watch a bunch of short comedy sketches produced by College Humor. So, despite the ubiquitous nature of web distribution, brands still do have to consider where their customers are when investing in new video programming.  In this sense, it’s actually a lot more complicated than knowing the target demographic is in front of the TV at 8pm on Thursdays to watch a hit show.

Ultimately, it will still come down to the bottom line, meaning sales for sponsors.  Since the early 1990s, the level of experimentation, theory, and faith in pure smoke vis a vis the web has been consistently high, even as the theories and lingo continue to change. You can sell a term like “engagement” to a marketing guy, but not to CFOs, who decide how to spend the money.  Clicks and shares of entertainment media are not the same as sales and and really not the same as building a relationship between a brand and customers through entertainment.  Additionally, some research indicates that building brand loyalty in the Internet Generation is harder than  a pre-digital-age market.

Oddly enough, I actually pitched the idea of creating a “TV” arm to a magazine once, so I’m a believer in the overall concept.  But as high-end TV entertainment on the web becomes increasingly more common, as more producers jump into the game, more brands experiment, and YouTube tries its hand at acting like a traditional media company, I believe we’ll see a massive expansion of production followed by a necessary contraction because even a global market of viewers can only support so many professional producers. Even as YouTube delves into the area of paid subscriptions, it is unclear first, whether or not consumers are already saturated by subscriptions to entertainment networks; and second, whether the producers of these shows can actually make a living in any of these models.

Once the line between web and TV is entirely erased, I suspect there may be a flattening out in the volume of professional production consumed. If, for instance, Conde Nast’s Traveler becomes a competitive network with The Travel Channel, this does not mean the target audience for travel content will then support a third, a fourth, and a fifth network producing the same kind of material.  Consider the number of cable channels you have, add to it the number of web-based portals you use for music, TV, or film, and consider how much of that total universe you have time to access. It is entirely possible that millions of us are still consuming the same hundred or so popular products and that broad demographic data still applies to marketing for sponsors.  And of course, from a cultural standpoint, as these venerable publishing brands branch out into TV production, we must hope they don’t fall into whatever molecular altering dimension that allows a network with a name like The Learning Channel to produce Honey Boo Boo.

 

The web is not a panacea.

Web

Whether you’re a democrat or a republican, I would hope that you can look at the US invasion of Iraq with analytical detachment, and  as such, I believe it is both fair and relevant to identify President Bush as having a crusader’s mentality.  For better or worse, I happen to think he legitimately believed that the relatively simple job of toppling Saddam Hussein would lead to democracy flourishing like flowers in fresh soil, and this is why he failed to heed voices warning of events that ultimately came to pass.  I raise the subject not to rehash criticism of that administration but to suggest that we might be wary of leaders, political or commercial, bearing panaceas.  And that brings us to this article from last week’s Guardian, an extraction from the book The New Digital Age:  Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, co-authored by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, Google’s Executive Chairman and Director of Google Ideas, respectively.  Ominously titled Web censorship:  the net is closing in, the excerpt is ostensibly a warning against state-run censorship of the internet in nations already known to be deficient in the civil liberties department.  And while some of the analyses and predictions are thought-provoking, the underlying premises and ultimate purpose of the article inspire a frisson similar to the one I felt the day Dick Cheney said, “I believe we’ll be greeted as liberators…”  And then?

The assumption of the piece is that an “open” internet breeds democratic reform but that balkanization through state censorship will fulfill this odd prediction:  “What started as the world wide web will begin to look more like the world itself, full of internal divisions and divergent interests,” write Schmidt and Cohen.  Really? Divergent interests, you say?  Even in the era of Googletopia, diversity will persist and result in cultural divisions ranging from benign philosophical differences to sectarian violence, tribal warlords, and inhumane states? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the global, free flow of information, if it’s possible to maintain the infrastructure, but if you think American exceptionalism can be blindly arrogant at times, what Schmidt and Cohen are selling, techno-exceptionalism if you will, is something potentially more insidious.

What President Bush believed we could do with a taste of democracy, Schmidt and Cohen seem to believe can be done with information technology. In fact the assumption of all techno-utopian views tends to treat information as though, if left pure, it can only be used one way and ultimately for the greater good.  Just looking within our own already-free society, it’s pretty clear that “information” isn’t even necessarily information. An American in Idaho can be indoctrinated to jihad via YouTube without setting foot in a Mosque, let alone the Middle East.  Authorities estimate an 800% increase in domestic extremism over the last decade, and guess how these groups connect with one another. The design of Web 2.0 can be a terrible tool for data quality because it favors the crowd, favors what’s popular (i.e. trending), and is built almost exclusively on an economy of ad impressions, which means the money doesn’t need to promote a well-researched article about Syria in favor of page views on GirlsinYogaPants.com.  So, the web already does “look like the world itself,” even without government imposed balkanization, and the world just might continue to be as complexly imperfect, brilliant, and idiotic as it ever was despite the record-breaking views of Gagnam Style.

Schmidt and Cohen write about “walled gardens,” which is tech-speak for limited web environments that can be relatively benign or insidiously watched by state or corporate entities.  Facebook is a walled garden that hundreds of millions of us use daily, and it is a pretty good example of voluntary disconnection that commands a substantial amount of our web-based attention here in freedom-loving USA.  After all, isn’t Facebook something of an expanded version of social cliques that have formed naturally for centuries without technology’s assistance? Other than knowing what friends and loved ones are up to, which is nice, I would argue that using a walled garden like Facebook for information is simply bestowing the role of curator to personal acquaintances whose “filters” we trust in a given context.

Of course, the more narrow that context happens to be, if you and your friends share some extreme view like American law needs more Old Testament in it, the walls in your garden will naturally close in without any help from a state supervisor. The web can be a tool for expanding one’s world view, but it is very often an even more powerful tool for substantiating pre-existing biases. So it is a naive evangelist who believes that the web is somehow the new “city on a hill” (speaking of the Bible).  Thus, Schmidt and Cohen begin to sound a bit like the digital age incarnation of Massachusetts Bay Colony founder John Winthrop, vowing to establish a foothold for the gospel whence enlightenment shall blossom, while glossing over the inherent imperialism in the enterprise.

No, I don’t want to see Iran build a “halal internet,” which would be its own version of the “great firewall of China,” but I have to question the motives of Google executives implying that this is the fulcrum on which the fate of that nation balances.  Iran managed to become the best educated, most progressive-leaning country in the Middle East before the Internet, and the forces that stand as a barrier to democratic reform are likely not due to a lack of available information or even contact with the outside world. We might just have to accept that Iran’s fate is not entirely ours to determine and that it’s a segment of the market Google doesn’t get to own. Yet.  Moreover, with the article’s final, dire words that an Iranian wall would “change the internet as we know it,” are we meant to infer that the censorship itself might spread to us and our fellow democratic societies?  Certainly, this is the belief among many out there, and it is bizarre to say the least when my fellow progressives put more faith in a multi-billion-dollar corporation to protect free expression than they do in one another.

But that’s the sleight of hand, isn’t it?  The masters of the web have convinced people that free expression hardly existed without this technology, while outside the walled gardens we find an illusion of an open web that is actually more circumscribed than many realize. Search results aren’t based on pure, boolean logic but are based on a number of factors ranging from paid positions to data mining us users, so Google algorithms can “help” us find what they assume we’re looking for. Or as a default, it seems to want to find what some seventeen year-old boy is looking for, which might explain why a search on the word “admiral” yields the top suggestion Ackbar.  And, of course, Wikipedia comes with everything.  Meanwhile, as Google pursues an agenda of consuming and monetizing every bit of data in human experience, violating privacy, trampling on intellectual property rights, and from time to time, just being evil, this one-world technological evangelism pushes us toward the day when we finally vest in a corporation the power of a state and the Information Age becomes a true Tower of Babel.  And it will be the well-meaning progressives who helped us do it.

If I had Eric Schmidt’s money and resources, and I really cared about the developing world, I can think of many places to start that are more pressing than the architecture of the internet in China or Iran.  Freedom can’t thrive on information and expression alone; it requires economic prosperity, security, and a universal belief in human rights. Off the cuff, I think of child slaves in the Cote d’Ivorie harvesting most of the world’s cocoa or the dangerous conditions of garment workers supplying the West, or the surprising number of homeless living in the New Jerusalem of Silicon Valley.  By contrast, fussing over hypothetical restrictions on Twitter just sounds dumb.