What do you imagine I’ve done if I told you I spent two hours on social media?
You’ll be amazed at how varied the results if you ask 40 adults at random what two hours of social media use looks like for them.
Latest
Media 2025 Explainer
Announcing Media 2025 – an experiment in digital-era publishing that is a cross-between a limited newsletter and a short book. It's 11 posts (10 paywalled – nearly 20,000 words) that provide state-of-the-moment thinking. Details and table of contents here.
After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century
After Mass Media explores how developments of the last 20 years challenge the role of audiovisual dramas - fictional series and movies - in constituting societies.
Media Industries in the Digital Age: How Media Businesses Work Today
Media Industries in the Digital Age reframes our understanding of media businesses in the light of the substantial changes of digital technologies and internet distribution.
Streaming Video: Storytelling Across Borders
Streaming Video maps the international production boom that emerged from global streaming services and what it means for producers, audiences, and storytellers.
Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-funded Video on Demand
Netflix and Streaming Video is the first book to provide a comprehensive foundation for understanding the business of subscriber-funded streaming video and its implications for the role of these services in culture.
Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals and Streaming Wars
Media Disrupted looks at what really happened when the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries were the ground zero of digital disruption. It's not that digital technologies introduced "new media," rather, they offered existing media new tools for reaching people.
Reports/Public papers
Links to reports and white papers
Introduction – Using media in 2025
Click on and read Media 2025 Explainer first
1: After scarcity: What has changed?
This first bit won’t be earth shattering to anyone reading this, but it is helpful to set the table with shared language and assumptions before diving in.
2: The challenges – and solutions – to understanding media now
After 25 years of digital change, the media sector stands substantially restructured. Most users don’t draw lines between sectors (TV, film) or within subsectors (linear, streaming); they just see an array of media available to satiate their leisure needs with varying degrees of friction.
3: Requiem for mass media
Many concepts of 20thC media culture went undefined because they seemed obvious. The bounds of ‘mass media’ were easy to observe and intuit, and it was difficult to imagine an alternative. The media sector has struggled to evolve its business because it has believed that 21stC hits are mass media.
Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television
Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television pushes understandings of the business of television to keep pace with the considerable technological change of the last decade.
We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television & the Internet Revolutionized It All
We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All tells the 20-year story of how cable became the center of popular culture and the internet arrived—not to kill television—but to revolutionize how it is produced and viewed.