The New Media Operating System

The term “digital first” has gained currency in discussions about change in the media business. It’s a useful concept for reframing our notions of content production and distribution in an era of digital networks and mobile devices. Digital first invites us to rethink our organizational models and staff skills, and retool for digital content production and distribution across all platforms.

It also fails to capture the most important aspect of the new media operating system: the increasing role of people circulating media in their own networks.

As I think about how I use media now, it's basically on my own terms. The World Wide Web and social media have become my portals to most content I consume, almost all on my own schedule. But it's not just about consumption. I have a multimedia studio in my pocket, and a global network at my fingertips. Through this network I have found people and communities who share my interests. Since my interests are somewhat diverse, I'm connected with many different communities which overlap in various ways. We all help each other understand and experience more together than we ever could alone as we create, share, respond, remix, and interact over time.

This is my personal network, and the relationships in it are based on shared interests and trust. As a citizen of the increasingly digital second decade of the 21st century, you have your network too. In our personal networks are people with whom we have strong or weak ties, enjoy short or long-term relationships, and provide mutual support in various ways. Just like any geographically-based community during the past 10 thousand years.

The end of the Broadcast Era

Publishing used to require access to a printing press, and as a result the act of publishing something was limited to a tiny fraction of the population, and reaching a population outside a geographically limited area was even more restricted. Now, once a user connects to the internet, he has access to a platform that is at once global and free. It isn't just that our communications tools are cheaper; they are also better. In particular, they are more favorable to innovative uses, because they are considerably more flexible than our old ones.

— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everyone, 2008

Once upon a time newspapers, magazines, books, radio, television, and film were the dominant lifeforms in the media ecosystem. These pre-digital forms were part of our daily lives, and became deeply embedded in our culture. In the 20th century they were the very definition of media. They enormously expanded our ability to percieve the world in real time, like the telegraph before them "annihilating time and space" (Prescott, 1860). Because these forms of media were so ubiquitous and pervasive, they also disrupted forms of communication and communal life that have been part of human culture for millennia.

Just a century ago most people celebrated their arts and cultural heritage by actively participating in them. Before we had access to mass-produced news and entertainment, we made our own. People told family stories and shared news with anyone in social reach. Families made music together, and the influx of musical traditions and instruments fueled an American folk music culture that lead to jazz, blues, and their electrified offspring. “Everyone was encouraged to take part, both men and women, from practiced musicians to visitors and children, and in the nineteenth-century home the quality might at times be excellent,” writes music historian Tim Brookes. “Yet in a sense that was not the point...it was an active, participatory tradition as opposed to the passive listening to radio and recordings.” (Brookes, 2005)

Henry Jenkins denotes a moment when the new mass media made possible by broadcasting quite naturally tapped the deep roots of American folk culture:

Initially, the emerging entertainment industry made its peace with folk practices, seeing the availability of grassroots singers and musicians as a potential talent pool, incorporating community sing-a-longs into film exhibition practices, and broadcasting amateur-hour talent competitions. The new industrialized arts required huge investments and thus demanded a mass audience. The commercial entertainment industry set standards of technical perfection and professional accomplishment few grassroots performers could match. The commercial industries developed powerful infrastructures that ensured that their messages reached everyone in America who wasn’t living under a rock. Increasingly, the commercial culture generated the stories, images, and sounds that mattered most to the public.

— Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2006

For the past century, because of the logistics and economics of mass-market media production and distribution, the individual's role in the media system was mostly limited to consumption. While Marshall McLuhan celebrated the role of electronic media as "a means of extending and expanding our organic sense lives into our environment," he also thought the industrialization of media technology fostered a sense of helplessness and passivity. "The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds stacked against him, and he adapts his attitudes unconciously." (McLuhan, 1951)

People want to be told stories, but they also want to tell them. They want to enjoy things created by others, but they also want to create and share their own things. They usually want to be in relationships and communities. Now we increasingly have access to powerful digital tools to both consume and create. We are no longer merely an passive audience at the end of a broadcast signal, but waking up to a new media system allows us to participate.

As participants in a media ecosystem increasingly based on relationships and sharing on digital, personal, and social networks, we are now disrupting the mass-market media system that some 100 years ago disrupted us.

The rise of a new media operating system

The People formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another - and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

— Jay Rosen, "The People Formerly Known as the Audience"

We now find ourselves in transition between a “culture of mass media” where media distribution was dominated by industrial-scale organizations and commercial interests, to a time when people drive the circulation of media based on their own passions. “The story of American arts in the twenty-first century might be told in terms of the public reemergence of grassroots creativity,” says Henry Jenkins, “as everyday people take advantage of new technologies that enable them to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.” (Jenkins, 2006)

By "grassroots creativity" we don't simply mean people producing the same forms of media from the past century. We also produce distinctively personal media for sharing with and maintaining social relationships. As we access content distributed by professional media producers, we appropriate the things we find of value for our personal networks of interest. The internet allows us to discover media from any available source on demand, and to recirculate it on our own terms. We harvest from everywhere and share each other's media. "This shift from distribution to circulation signals a movement toward a more participatory model of culture, one which sees the public not simply as consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined." (Jenkins, Ford, and Green, 2013)

"If it doesn't spread, it's dead"

The concept of media spreadability recognizes the social logistics and cultural practices that are coming to define the post-broadcast age. "Our readers are perhaps our greatest untapped resource," write the authors of The New York Times Innovation report. "Deepening our connection with them both online and offline is critical in a world where content so often reaches its broadest audience on the backs of other readers." Initially leaked in May 2014, the Times' report represents a startling acknowledgement of decline for the industrial media model that very expensively delivers printed newspapers to a dwindling number of doorsteps.

This isn't to say that broadcasting and forms of publishing that were dominant in the 20th century will wither to extinction. We will continue to value content produced by professionals and artists and distributed by large corporate entities. With so much change happening in the world, we need reporting by professional journalists more than ever, and people will continue to look for credible news sources. One-to-many channels will continue to play a vital role in distributing news and cultural media to large audiences. What's new is the role of individuals in appropriating and spreading this content in their own digital communities and social networks.

Public media stations are extremely well positioned for this world because we are deeply embedded in many communities. There are dangers ahead, such as the dominance of new technical and financial behemoths who control large proprietary platforms in pursuit of their own corporate interests; inequality of access; privacy concerns; censorship and surveillance; conflicts over copyright; and threats to the openness of the internet itself.

Despite the obstacles and confusions of this transitional period, we are all increasingly interconnected and interactive in networks and communities of our own choosing. Social media networks are disrupting the 20th century model of how people encounter news and cultural media. For pre-digital media organizations, adjusting to this disruption will be the biggest challenge to surviving the transition.

What public media can do

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

— Douglas Adams, "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet", 1999

The new media operating system of the 21st century is based on shared interests among people living in diverse, overlapping communities. In many ways it's a restoration of the traditions of communal living and village life that have characterized the past 10 thousand years of human history. But now the village is global.

Our media creation tools and distribution networks now rely on digital technology and the internet, so public media must be really good at "digital first" operations. We need to be well versed in all the arts and crafts of digital multimedia.

But instead of beaming content down from on high to passive recipients, we need to act as participants in a continuing conversation about knowledge, culture, and community life. And if we want to make media work for people and communities, we need to do everything we can to help everyone participate.

References:

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everyone, Penguin (2008)

George Bartlett Prescott, History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph, (1860)

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collid, NYU Press (2006)

Tim Brookes, Guitar: An American Life, Grove Press (2005)

Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Vanguard Press (1951)

Jay Rosen, "The People Formerly Known as the Audience", published in The Social Media Reader, Mandiberg, ed., NYU Press (2012)

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, NYU Press (2013)

The New York Times, Innovation, internal Times report (2014) — available on Scribd

Douglas Adams, "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet," (1999)

Image: "Kencf0618FacebookNetwork" by Kencf0618 - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.