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Sunday, January 11, 2004
Tirade shows 
| | I'm writing my CES piece for Linux Journal from a Starbucks somewhere in Las Vegas. Look for it at LJ in the next day or two. |
| | Meanwhile Dan Gillmor's column today, Democratizing the Media, offers thoughts following Macworld that are similar to mine, which ran Friday in LJ: |
| | The broadcast culture assumes that most of us are "consumers" of mass media. We are merely receptacles for what Hollywood, the music industry and even our local daily newspaper decide we should view, hear or read. |
| | The post-broadcast culture is a democratization of media, and it comes at things from the opposite stance. It says that anyone also can be a creator, not just a consumer. There's a world of difference. |
| | Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management who has done insightful research into innovation, spotlights the valuable role played by what he calls "lead users." These are customers who like a product so much that they're willing to spend their own time helping to improve it. Maybe businesses should ask their customers for ads, too, and pay for the ones they use. |
| | The entertainment and news businesses -- the chief purveyors of the newly democratizing stuff we call "content" -- will have to modify their traditional gatekeeping role. I'm not sure they will make this conceptual leap, in part because it's also a business risk. |
| | If they don't, look for others to offer a platform. Who, for example? Consider: One of the options in Apple GarageBand software is to save your newly created piece to an MP3, or to your iTunes music library. And you can save a video to a DVD. Suppose Apple let you save your new song, or your new movie, to the iTunes Music (and, someday, Video) Store, too. It's a thought. |
| | It would surprise me if it isn't also an intention. Jobs and Apple helping move the means of "content" production to the hands of "consumers" so rapidly that it's going to change the whole market ecosystem whether or not Apple provides distribution and retailing. More from my Friday piece: |
| | The first clue came when Steve Jobs dropped a line about how much he and Apple "love music". Other clues came when he talked about the iTunes music store, which clearly is challenging the established way of doing things in the music industry. Still more clues came when he showed off enhancements to iDVD, which makes producing DVDs exceptionally easy. But the picture finally became clear when he spent an almost unbearably long time showing off a new application called GarageBand, "an anytime, anywhere recording studio packed with hundreds of instruments and a recording engineer or two for good measure". For the first time I saw that this isn't simply a technical or marketing hack--it's an economic one. |
| | It's easy to say that what Apple's doing here is about marketing. But it's not, even though clever marketing is involved. See, marketing is about influencing markets. It's about spin. In the mass-market millieu where Apple lives, it's about maintaining the fully saturated Matrix-like habitat we call Consumer Culture. That culture was built by those who own and control the means of production. So, what we call "consumer electronics" is really producer electronics. It isn't about what you and I invent and contribute to the marketplace. It's about what Sony and Panasonic and Nikon and Canon produce and distribute through retailers for us, the mass market, to consume constantly. It's producerism, really. As a label, "consumerism" is a red herring. Talking about "consumerism" takes the conversation off into victimville, where the poor consumer needs to get better stuff and less abuse from the big bad producer. |
| | Apple is giving consumers tools that make them producers. This practice radically transforms both the marketplace and the economy that thrives on it... |
| | The Mac World (trade show included, pun intended) is still an old-fashioned vendor-built environment--one of the last of its type, you might say. But it also is adapting to a larger ecosystem in which demand supplies its own generic infrastructural building materials, supported by a culture that values sharing and disclosure more than hoarding and secrecy. Even if Apple isn't plugging Darwin right now, the fact that Darwin is UNIX speaks volumes about technology and market ecosystems that Apple understands in ways that other old fashioned companies--notably Microsoft--still don't. |
| | What Apple's doing with "i" apps like GarageBand isn't about the computer industry; it's about the entertainment industry. That industry lately has become vigilant about threats from its customers, which it still thinks of as consumers. Instead it should be watching how Apple transforms those consumers into producers. Because the next challenge will be finding ways to turn those producers into partners. The old gig is up. They'll never be just "consumers" again. |
| | How long before we have a Producers Electronics Show? Probably not ever. Still, the trend is underway. The market will get smarter faster than most trade shows. |
Watching the detectives
| | Over the holidays, an idea gained some Net traction: webloggers "adopting" a campaign reporter. That means you monitor and collect all the reporter's work, and then... And then what? Follow the turns as the suggestion is taken up. |
| | I like the idea that people are watching what I say and correcting me if I get things wrong -- or challenging my conclusions, based on the same facts (or facts I hadn't know about when I wrote the piece.) This is a piece of tomorrow's journalism, and we in the business should welcome the feedback and assistance that, if we do it right, becomes part of a larger conversation. |
| | But if the idea is to create some kind of organized collection of Truth Squads, I'm less comfortable. Here are just three of the many, many questions/issues that come immediately to mind (and as you'll see, I'm not alone in wondering these things): |
| | I think there's another issue here: one of class, or caste. As members of The Press his last week at Macworld and CES, Dan and I belonged to an exclusive club, with its own private rooms, free food, wi-fi Net connections, and other freebies, not to mention special treatment by vendors. We're insiders. |
| | Yet many markets — politics and technology are just two — include a growing number of outsiders with online journals who are just as important to the market's ecosystem as credentialed journalists. It's only natural, at this early stage in our evolution to what Dan calls Journalism 3.0, for outsiders to play gotcha! with insiders. |
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