1: After scarcity: What has changed?

The way I organize the changes and how they matter are the bit of that ‘pencil drawing’ that I’ve already drawn in permanent marker (see Media Industries in the Digital Age; Media Disrupted for deeper background). It isn’t enough to say ‘digital disruption’; we need to appreciate exactly what ‘digital’ disrupted and why to understand where we are and to apprehend the challenges yet to come. It didn’t go as many forecast and a lot of myths about what did happen remain.

Digital technologies used in media production have radically re-made media ecosystems – the media content available and the structures that create and circulate it – and consumer experience, but most of the disruption comes from internet distribution of media. The core of the change derives from exponential expansion in content choice and control over how and when users access media. [The terms are ‘user’ and ‘content’ because they are flexible and span readers, watchers, listeners, players and associated media goods.]

Choice emerged because of 1) digital distribution capacity (many-to-many or many-to-few instead of one-to-many), 2) services that host and distribute content made by ‘anyone,’ and 3) their unusual business model that doesn’t guarantee earning for media makers. Internet distribution (on-demand access) improves user control from what broadcast media offered, but also expands the array of media experiences available (Spotify offers different kinds of playlists, song, album listening; the ability to access words (‘print’) in units as varied as notifications, headlines, social media posts, articles, and ‘publications’). Together, choice and control eradicated scarcity, which was a – if not the – unacknowledged foundation of predigital media strategy.

Change can be clustered into four developments that deliver a variety of cultural and industrial consequences.

Social media (as it exists in the 2020s)

Cultural consequences

• Delivers content of specific interest to users
• Enables users to share clips and content with friends

Industrial consequences

• Leads to diminished advertiser spending in media that commission/license content
• Provides a discovery mechanism for hosted media makers
• Attracts investor spend because of profit margins possible when attracting attention without paying for content

Notably, social media has evolved considerably over the last two decades. We can identify three distinct phases in terms of its broad social use that roughly map on to the decades of the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s).

Hosted content (e.g. YouTube, Substack/Ghost.io – ‘open’ distribution that enables direct content monetization by media makers outside of legacy operations that pay a license fee or commission the content they distribute)

Cultural consequences

• Massively expands ‘commercial’ media and makes a great array of hobbyist (noncommercial) media available

Industrial consequences

• Draws away attention and advertiser spending from media that commission/ license content
• Creates a new, still poorly understood media sector (with distinct subsectors) 

Libraries/On demand (not schedules, editions, or users owning media)

Cultural consequences

• Changes the common ‘unit’ of consumption, expands units available to consumers’ use, and diminishes dominant ‘norms’
• Enables ‘disaggregation’ of newspapers, albums, and schedules and affords greater control over experience

Industrial consequences

• Challenges business models and strategies for developing, promoting, and licensing media based on predigital business models and distribution bundling

Mobileness

Cultural consequences

• Expands geography of media consumption, both out of and within the home
• Creates a personalized environment for consumption of media previously typical of shared spaces in homes

Industrial consequences

• Enables more personalized use relevant to both ad and consumer funded media
• Creates more competition for user time and money and challenges previous norms that required settling (compromises on what to watch/what main household screen could be used for)

 These four changes collectively destroy the ‘mass media’ experience of simultaneous consumption among co-located populations (society), or media consumption constrained by time and space. They eliminate the relative scarcity of content that was crucial to creating mass media – often a matter of people submitting to the option deemed ‘good enough’ rather than being able to use media to access content truly compelling.

Most existing understandings of media and society assume the predigital, mass-media experience as ‘normal’; most industry strategy is also built on those assumptions. Mass scale is now rare, and if it is achieved, it is through assembling a transnational audience (which may make the economics work but means something very different in terms of media’s social and cultural roles and the meaning of industrial measures like ‘hits’).

I’ve written a lot on the industrial dynamics of what happened if you want more detail (see Media Industries in the Digital Age; Media Disrupted), but this is the most digested form to set up what follows.