Setting the scene: What's the Future of the Web and News
“Setting the Scene: What’s the Future of the Web and News”
8 a.m. on Friday, June 30, 2006 / University of Massachuetts at Amherst / Media Giraffe Summit
A news-industry research expert and a key observer and facilitator of online multimedia news trends forecast the next year and the next decades for the Fourth Estate. How should media executives, citizen journalists, political strategists/public officials, educators and technologists prepare - and collaborate? Conveners: Dale Peskin, The Media Center at the American Press Institute; Lee Rainie, director, The Pew Project on Internet & Society. (As of January, 2007, Dale Peskin then a principal with iFocos, the Institute for the Connected Society -- http://www.ifocos.org)
THESE ARE EXCERPTED NOTES OF THE 55-MINUTE PRESENTATION AND Q&A SESSION. ALL QUOTATIONS ARE PARAPHRASED UNLESS IN DIRECT QUOTES. FOR PRECISE QUOTATION AND FULL CONTEXT, REFER TO THE QUICKTIME VIDEO. Times in parentheses refer to approximate locations within the QuickTime video.
PESKIN: He comes from the point of view of media, not specifically newspapers. To speak about, to analyze, or operate in one platform in these days is "absolutely ludicrous." The press was a "great 15th-century technology." Regarding the American Press Institute, which sponsored The Media Center (disbanded, fall 2006). Peskin says The Media Center is not explicitly American, not specifically about Press and they are not an Institute. The look at research as a social science. He shows a research report the have done.
Reactions to "Where is Love" Media Center video
Peskin shows the "Where is Love," video produced by The Media Center.. The punch line: "One World, Many Voices." He says of The Media Center: "We document media usage around the world by being good observers . . . . and hopefully putting some analysis behind it." He asks: What did you see in those images?
A: Post Gutenberg. The new reality.
Peskin: Exactly. We are on the cusp of something huge. . . . . what else?
A: Lots of computers.
Peskin: Lots of computers. Digital media
A: No one watching languages.
A: Different languages.
Q: I was kind of struck at a panel last night that had seven white guys up there. (11:56) The world doesn't look like that and the new is incredibly diverse. It cuts across gender and race and ethnicity and age to it and you begin to appreciate this when you get around. The world looks very differently and the old issues of diversity - we don't have to worry about anymore. When we do a conference on we media the conferences and worry about getting the right numbers of kinds of people up there - we don't have to worry about that anymore because it just happens." (12:27)
A: Optimism.
Peskin: (12:40) We see incredible optimism, a joy in information and the relationship with it that I've never experienced in my lifetime. This is fun. (12:49)
A: Multitasking.
Peskin: You see immediacy, you certainly see mobility as well. The ability to take it with you.
A: Citizen control.
Peskin: Control is huge. The notion that person media puts people in control and what to do with information.
A: A concern comes up for me .... I'm wondering about the fairly big chunk of the world that doesn't connect to computer and is that chunk being left behind.
Peskin: (14:15) I must tell you that is always a concern with new technology even down to indoor plumbing. So yea, there is a concern. But understand that in this country we are well behind many parts of the world in doing this. Outside of Africa, where mobile technology is going to provide a new kind of infrastructure to connect people. That's been a traditional kind of concern. (14:45)
A: With the $100 laptop initiative that too is being addressed.
Peskin: "We think the mobile telephone will probably be more effecting at providing information to those parts of the world than that."
A: (John McManus) Movie suggests hypocrisy that we have lost our way, the hip-hop theme is pessimistic and that we have strayed from our core values.
Peskin: To some extent, I think it is how you define those core values. I was thinking more of the idea of loving the audience and what they are doing as opposed to the traditional sources of information.
A: Not at all. It is the media pumping out negative images to young people and them trying to emulate it ... it's a different conversation.
Peskin: It is a different conversation. I guess I am more optimistic about it . . . . the point I wanted to take is this an audience-generated medium and we probably haven't respected the wisdom of crowds as we might have.
Peskin: Putting some of their spin and analysis into what this all means. "This stuff isn't very new. Although corporations may be discovering it now because their stock prices are down and their circulations are falling. This has been going on for awhile and the warnings have been around for a very long time."
What NDN found in 1995 about consumer information trends
The newspaper industry funded New Directions for News with the Rand Corporation in 1995. This is what they predicted:
- Society would fragment
- Internet would create a universal community
- Distrust of traditional media would grow
- Many media sources and products would emerge
- Everyone would be a journalist
- The teen market would globalize
- There would be a declining market share for mass media
- News providers would be threatened
- News margins and businesses would decline.
Shows the Hirshberg video: "Day of the Long Tail"
Next he shows this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4151339586237257762
In June, 2006, Peter Hirshberg, chairman and chief marketing officer of Technorati Inc., created a three-minute video which parodies a movie tailer for the sci-fi thriller "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." It's called "The Day of the Long Tail," borrowing from the title of a now-famous book by Chris Anderson (editor of Wired magazine) about the way the Internet extends and infinitely deepens the ability to sell niche products. The mock tailer's serious purpose: To suggest that the audience for mass-market media is no longer passive and is taking control. Peskin says it shows how you can make money on thousands of transactions rather than individual transactions.
"Now, this was in 1995. Does anyone know what the reaction of the news industry was? "Yea, good boy Dale, yea, right!" And these scenarios were set 16 years out. These things were to occur in 2010. What was wrong with that? They occurred within about five years instead of 15 years. And this is why we call it suspended disbelief, which I think is still going on. I think there is still suspended disbelief in 2006."
ALSO SEE: http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/medill/inside/news/crain_speaker_peter_hirshberg_discusses_bloggings_effect_on_media_and_branding.html And: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
Lee Rainie of Pew begins his presentation
(23:50) LEE RAINIE: "So Dale described himself as the sherpa and the explorer. And I am the idiot savant." The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-partisan research effort, work that illuminates the impact of Internet use on people's social world. He starts by looking at the changing home ecology.
More roots, products, outputs
Thirty years ago in a typical American home there were the media products delivered and the routes by which they were delivered, how they were rendered in the home and how they were stored in the home. He shows a PowerPoint showing that everything has gotten more complicated with more roots, more products, more output devices.
Multitasking now the rule
A study by Ball State University in Indiana studied what people do. Four hours a day of TV, still. All Internet use is about 90 minutes a day; if you have broadband it is about two hours a day, 80 minutes of radio, 65 minutes of MP3 players or other video; about 42 minutes of phone use; and print. People are cramming about 8.5 hours of media exposure into 6.5 hours a day. "Multitasking is the way of the world," and TV is still dominant.
Less time overall spent with news, more of it on Internet
He displays a chart showing a chart of news usage showing local tv, national tv, cable news, online news, newspapers and radio. (27:30) "Overall if you ask people how they are spending time with media, over time, they are spending less time with news. The aggregate drop is about eight minutes from 1994 to 2004. But is most pronounced among the younger users." (28:20)
(28:30) "Where is it going? It's going to the Internet." About 73% of American adults now use the internet. About 87% of American teenagers. In 42% of American homes, broadband is the dominant Internet experience now. 69% of people with Internet in the home now have broadband. (28:58) One of the most Industry stories is that DSL has now caught up and surpassed cable. (29:30) They do more things on line - and more more likely to report positive benefits and they watch less tv for sure, the sleep a little bit less and they multitask a lot more. (29:53)
(29:55) In the news environment itself there is a growing use of the Internet for the news. It is a displacement effect for most people - they switch off of other media to get news from the web. But with the heaviest users - most broadband users - the Internet is a supplement to other kinds of things. They are still getting news from TV, newspaper and radios. (30:29) "They are just information omnivores. They want to get it from any source, anytime and anywhere and their reliance on the Internet has grown because it is so much easier to get it at work, at home, anywhere."
(30:50) Hard to ask people about their news usage because they don't remember where they heard it. When you ask very precisely it turns out they get more news than they remember getting. It is between 44 million and 50 million people who got news "yesterday" depending how carefully you ask the questions. "It is a commodity, it is part of the atmosphere of Internet use..... (32:00) Your change of connecting to news is much higher." Many people say they bumped into it. They encounter it and begin to link with it. (32:20)
"Bumping into" news overrides DailyMe concern for now
(32:30) "In the era of the DailyMe, which Nicholas Negroponte's book, "Being Digital," talked about, the great fear was that as information proliferated, so they couldn't keep in touch with it more, as the tools for customizing it got better, that people would increasingly live in a sort of an hermetically sealed information bubble, where they'd only customize their information experience to match their world view or their lifestyle or their belief system or to encounter people like them. (33:01) And as more and more people in this balkanized world had separate, unique media experiences apart from their fellow citizens, it would just be harder for us to have a common culture to talk about, common experiences to talk about, a common knowledge base to talk about. (33:18) Well it turns out that this bumping into news online has a beneficial effect that so far, not for good and for all [time] is mitigating against that balkanizing universe. (33:32) That the people who are the heaviest users of the Internet also encounter the most information and the most people who disagree with them.(33:38) We did this research at the end of the 2004 campaign and we found out that the heaviest Internet users - the people who are the most likely to customize information and have RSS feeds and have Google alerts and belong to listserves and stuff like that; it turns out they were aware of a wider array of information including stuff that disagreed with their world view, in part because of this bumping into information, encountering information as they were doing other things online (34:03) Good news story so far. (34:07).
A community-building effect
Internet users are the most likely people to be getting news from any kinds of sources ... it is true for people in the highest incomes . .. . and the highest educational level. It is an additive, community-building effect. They say it is strictly easier to get news online when you want it than from any other sources. "But the other thing that is going on is that people can follow their own bliss." (35:15) They say they aren't getting the information they want from other sources. But they tend to go to traditional news organization, mainstream sites. Broadband users are more likely to also go to international sites, blogs, non-traditional sites and listserves. They did find some of the DailyMe effect. About 21% of news consumers online are looking for alternative points of view. "They want to figure out what the enemy is saying so they can shoot down the arguments." (36:50) A significant number are seeking out points of views, world views that don't match their world view.
A fifth of users go to alternative sites
(37:05) On any given day, about a fifth of news consumers are getting news from alternative sites. There were a lot more getting it from international and alternative sites during the Tsunami and during spikes in the Gulf war. This is true whenever there is big news going on.
(37:55) About a half of those who get news online have registered at news sites. It is a strategy now that people feel relatively comfortable embracing - users feel comfortable. About 1 in 20 users have actually paid for something online - broadband users are more likely to do that. About a quarter of users have set up "alerts." (38:45) Information about news related to their jobs, horoscopes, weather info.
Q&A with Rainie begins
(38:09) Stops and invites questions.
Q: How did you define news.
RAINIE: They really didn't. They let people self define news. When they ask for specific definitions of news, they get a higher usage rate. (40:00) It grows from 76% to 85% people say they use one of the items listed. "So, we didn't define it which is the short answer" except in cases where they probed topically.
Fifty percent of teens create "content"
RAINIE: Fifty percent of teen-agers have created content of one sort or another; 35% of adults; that's more than 50 million people who have posted a creative work of one kind or another on line, have a personal web site or have helped people with their websites. It's a growing number. That doesn't include sharing bookmarks.
Internet is about community
(42:48) "My sense is the Internet is all about community. Marshall McLuhan talked about technologies of communication having their own grammar. The grammar of the Internet is for community-building and sharing. It's as simple and as powerful as that." (43:02).
(44:05) RAINIE: "We have identified a cohort of heavy Internet, it is about half of the broadband users at home, who are more likely to get news and information on any given day from the Internet than from TV. For two generations, TV has been the dominant news source , conversational source of news for this culture and we are now finding that a proportion of Internet users are privileging the Internet over TV. It's likely to grow over time, as broadband use grows over time, as bandwidth itself expands and stuff like and as more people find the stuff they want and the communities they want online. (44:44) So that in many respects is the biggest of the social and demographic changes that's in our future. (44:52)
Channel competition will become one big channel
(45:12) RAINIE: In the 2016 universe, that Dale was talking about, the notion that there is channel competition, that newspapers are in competition with TV in competition with the Internet, will fade away. When everything is digitized, and when it's fed into any device anyhow and anyway it starts in some respects it is silly to be making these distinctions because they won't exist in peoples' heads. (45:33)
PESKIN: He things of the Internet like electricity. A way to do lots of things. Does it increase isolation or does it promote relationships which are now global. Does it change how we look at what local means? The notion that the Internet is an exercise for pajama people is absurd. There are extraordinary applications of the Internet, that power businesses, transactions, communications, that change relationships in our society. What's going on are structural changes in all of that. It is just starting . . . there is a lot more of this coming.
(49:00) PESKIN: The restructing is going way beyond the news industry. Telecommunications, advertising.
Q: What is the demographic of their subjects?
RAINIE: Adults 18 or old, nationally representative sample in the 48 contiguous states. They survey teen-agers separately.
We do not know the identity of the next questioner, who opened an interesting angle.
On the loss of "close discussion" partners
Q: A sociologically study out in June 2006 showed that closed discussion partners, the people who had someone they could talk with about important matters, from 1985 to 2005 had dropped from 3 to 2 which sociologically is a huge drop, and the mode, the largest cluster, had dropped from 3 to zero. A very, very rapid erosion of strong ties. The kind of community we are used to is eroding so rapidly, it is almost like the sociological equivalent of glaciers beginning to drop under the effect of global warming. What this also suggests is that many more people are substituting these weak ties for the strong ties they used to have. This started in 1985 before the Internet. These changes are isomorphic with respect to the Internet - they may be driving the Internet usage patterns. But the Internet is the medium of weak tie community par excellance. So all these little communities are a way that people can respond to this deeper erosion that's going on in their lives. There is a lot that we could say about that, but it is am important part of the backdrop.
PESKIN: Mentions Robert Putnam's book, "Bowling Alone," as relevant.
Barry Weldmann's "networked individualism
(52:15) RAINIE: Barry Weldmann at University of Toronto talks about Networked Individualism. He says what's going on now is a switch from household or group behavior to networked behavior. This is the weak ties universe we are now entering; the technology allows us to stay in touch with more people in more ways. An associated thing that goes on with that is we have separated our lives into these various networks. "We have one network of friends that helps us think through work-related stuff, another network that might help us with health-related stuff; a third network that might relate to financial things. And we sort of toggle between networks as our needs arise. (53:05) But one of his arguments is it does attenuate those ties that make us most connected to our immediate communities and our families."
"The whole feast" not a particular application
Q: What about network neutrality?
RAINIE: (53:58) "The Pew Internet & American Life Project does not have opinion on things like this but our data tell us something really important. In the mid-90s, when the commercial Internet and web came into being, the initial thing that got people online was email. They loved that application above all else. It's still the No. 1 thing that people do online .... Over time as applications grew and became more powerful, other things became more attractive and a network effect came into being to. So for example, the proliferation of health-care information in the late 1990s was a big driven of women coming online in late 1999, 2000 and 2001 and in America, them overtaking men as the absolute number of Internet users. (54:54) What we see particularly with people who convert from dialup to broadband and that is mostly the route that people go .... The biggest driver of that is the whole feast. It is not a particular application . .. . it is that they can do more stuff in more ways in all the plentitude available. So for the purpose of network neutrality, I think what they are saying is don't mess with my ability to enjoy the feast. (55:32) They don't even know what the term means. We've begun to pilot test some questions on this. It's hopeless. The political debate does not have reference points in their heads. But they really enjoy the variety of things they can do online and that they can be contributors and community builders. (55:50)
Q: Believes the early questioner's sociological question has to do with fascistic trends - do we want to get into that? People become more malleable to repeated mass appeal even when those mas appeals are palpably false. That's a comment, not an opinion.
PESKIN: Thinks that view diminishes the intelligence of individuals. "And I think what we are witnessing is the wisdom of crowds and not the malleability of crowds. And clearly there are forces that have always been with us to control information and to control thinking about it and they ultimately fail and I think we've got, if this is occurring, it is occurring at the time of an incredible democratization of media. (57:25) So there is a kind of paradox going on there. If media is becoming more dramatic than ever, is our society becoming more facist and our ability control it? I just don't believe that."
RAINIE: Recommends Howard Reingold's book: "Smart Mobs." It is much less a command-and-control era. To the degree people are worried about things the questioner is talking about, they are using the Internet as a workaround - "They are creating sort of para-politics and para-social groupings which look a lot different than the mass-media era." (58:37) "Which doesn't minimize what you're saying."
Q: More people voted in recent American Idol than voted in the presidential election.
PESKIN: "I don't think American Idol is about the wisdom of crowds." Recommends the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowicki.
TAPE ENDS
