Since the invention of mass media we have been taught that media is to be passively consumed. Someone has already done all the hard work for us and we are supposed to sit back and enjoy the show. The business model of selling masses of passive readers/listeners/viewers to advertisers actually requires that the consumers can not react to non-relevant content or advertising. When the consumers have a voice, media companies have to work twice as hard to please both advertisers and consumers.

I believe people are fundamentally lazy. We like consuming media the easy way. Sitting back, relaxing and accepting anything adequate. And that is fine for mass media, they can offer us content that just barely exceeds our threshold of acceptability. Content that gets as many people as possible to watch/listen/read and not go away. Lowest common denominator -content.

The question is: just how lazy are we? If we really are as lazy as it seems today, then mass media is going to be just fine for quite a while. People still will not put in the extra effort required to find the content that they enjoy more than the content that is automatically pushed to them. On the other hand, if laziness is just a bad habit then mass media is in for the ride of its life. People will trip over themselves to find all the wonderful content about the subject they are passionate about. And that will truly change the media game.

The smallest form of participation is actively finding content that suits your needs. Not being content with content that someone else thinks suits your needs. And there is the participation divide. The divide between people that are willing to actively search for personally relevant content and those that are happy with the stuff that is pushed to them.

Digital natives have already crossed the participation divide. Old habits do die hard, so I am predicting that it will take a few years for the masses to start hopping over.

Education, privacy, democracy, copyright, media and commerce. I am repeating myself (see Silence is golden) but I thought some clarification might be in order.

Education

When information was scarce it was essential that people learned how to wade through large masses of text and remember the most important things. Education it was called. Digitalization has made information plentiful. Basically any piece of information that a regular person might need can be found in mere seconds.

Digital tools are even giving the sacred art of writing a run for its money. The tools are giving us the power to effortlessly combine images, video, audio (smell and taste are still going to take a while) and share them with others. Why try to write about something when you can just use the tools to show the real thing? Sure, the most talented writers are going to be able to capture the moment, idea or feeling perfectly but the rest of us are going to use the easy way out.

Education should not be the same as it was before. It should be about creating ideas. Creatively combining information and media to make something new. Something of value.

Privacy

Digital information is eternal. Once you make something public in a digital format it becomes eternal. It might be a bit hard to find, but chances are someone somewhere has it. There have been quite a few campaigns aimed at teens addressing this issue. The argument is always: “Do not put anything questionable online because it is going to lessen your chances of getting a job in the future. The people that are thinking of hiring you will not do so once they find the thing.”

The only flaw in this logic is that the people that are doing the hiring will also have some indiscretion tarnishing their reputation. At it will be online for everyone to see. Once everyone has something, it levels thing out. People are no longer going to care so much.

User generated content is going to change the way we think about privacy. What was once though of as private will no longer be so. And people are going to be ok with it, because humans have been living in small villages and communities where basically everything is public for a lot longer than we have been living in large cities. The only difference will be that this time the village is global.

Democracy

We have already seen a few examples of what digitalization is doing to democracy and politics. The free flow of information is going to wreak havoc on politicians that have something to hide. People are using digital tools to speak up about the issues that they care about. They are forming communities and putting pressure on people that are in a position to change things.

Unfortunately the public sector has not yet opened up the wealth of data they have stored in their massive databases. I bet that once that happens, even politically inactive citizens might find a good reason to become active. Going to vote on election day might still be too tough for them but they would have the possibility to do some watchdogging from the comfort of their own homes.

Copyright

From Wikipedia: “Copyright is a legal concept that gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited period of time. At its most general, it is literally “the right to copy”…”

Copyright is a very good concept. It rightfully prevents anyone from stealing another persons creative work. The problem is that digitalization is making it impossible to enforce the law. Copying, modifying and distributing anything in digital format is just too easy. In fact, digital is the the new punk. Only this time, it is not only about music. It is about everything. Punk news. Punk tv. Punk anything and everything.

So the only way to get out of this mess is to figure out something new. Something that ensures that artist and creators get paid for what they do and the public is not unnecessarily inconvenienced with laws that are unenforceable.

Media

Talk about turmoil. I bet that each and every media company executive in the world is scratching their head trying to figure out what to do.

Problem number one:
The old business model was based on creating content for an audience and inserting ads between the two. The audience has become the content creator so there is no place to stick the ads anymore.

Problem number two:
The internet is a lousy mass medium. By my unscientific calculations the websites per users ratio is currently at a little under 10. And that is only counting sites, not the billions of pages that the websites contain. Even if everyone visited a hundred websites a day the mass would only be a thousand strong.

It is just not going to work out when the business has been built on rounding up the masses and selling advertising based on that. No mass available.

Commerce

Yeah, eCommerce and all that. In honor of the new year I think something more inspirational is in order.

3D printing. Yes, printers that print 3D object instead of text and images on paper. The current 3D-printers are not very useful to ordinary people. Yet. Think about mobile phones twenty years ago. Very expensive, very cumbersome and not very useful, because not very many people owned one.

If 3D-printing technology evolves at the same rate mobile phones did, the next revolution in commerce will begin before the current one is over. Imagine if buying a household object becomes as easy as buying music from the iTunes music store currently is. A few clicks (or a few something else. It would be nice if someone figured out a better interface than the mouse and keyboard by then) to buy a 3d-model of the object and a few more to print it.

Now, that is what I call eCommerce.

Oh yeah, there are some other issues involved with 3d-printing, like copyright, but more on them later.

Working for Gyllene Skor I get to talk to a lot of clients and help them figure out what would be the best way to do business in the digital world. One sector that currently really stands out is media. Each and every media company in Finland seems to be in some sort of turmoil. They have a huge challenge in turning from publishers to relationship companies.

Why relationship?

Digital media is turning content into a commodity. It is impossible for any company to control content once it has been let loose in a digital format. Copying and distributing is just too damn easy. Once something is published in a digital format you can be sure that it will be available somewhere else. Just like that.

Producing content is also too easy. Anyone can do it and anyone will. The media companies have very limited resources compared to the number of citizens so the odds are that someone else will be the producer of the content.

The only way to win this is to aim to be the company that people turn to when they need content. It does not matter what the source of the content is. It does not matter who got it first. What matters is who the consumers are going to turn to when they need their daily dose.

The biggest problem the media companies currently have is that their income model is based on volume. The larger the audience, the larger the bill they can send advertisers. The problem is that there is no way you can build a relationship with, let’s say, 50 000 people at a time. Building relationships is a one-on-one thing.

The second problem is that the media companies have their content stuck in internal organizational silos. If one part of the company has produced content, there is no way any other part of the company can publish the content. But digital does not work that way. Consumers are not stuck to one or two sources of content. Consumers are hopping, skipping and jumping to any place where they can get the content they want.

So, the first step for media companies is to figure out how they can start charging for the quality of the contacts they have and not the quantity. The second step is to take down any internal barriers that might hinder the flow of content from one part of the company to the other.

Then they can start thinking about building relationships. Then they can start thinking about how to deliver relevant content in a timely fashion to each and every one of their contacts. It might not even matter if you are the fastest or not. What matters is providing the content your customer wants when he wants it.

Dagens Nyheter has a nice approach to building relationships. Actually, I really hope they see their approach as building relationships and not just another way to mass distribute their content. What they have done is team up with Nokia to provide their content via a special edition Dagens Nyheter mobile phone.

I can not imagine anything more exiting. Dagens Nyheter will know exactly who their customers are and what kind of news they prefer. And the best thing: they know exactly which ads are working for which customer. Serving relevant content AND ads. Now, that is the start of a beautiful relationship.

I will be the first to subscribe when a media company offers a Kindle-type device as one of their subscription options. I will gladly pay a monthly fee for the device and get my content free. Or am I paying for the content and getting the device for free? It really does not matter. What matters is that I am getting the content that I want and the media company is getting paid for it.