Barrel Strength

Here Comes Everybody
The Long Tail
Planet Google

The world we are currently experiencing is a consequence of technical arrangements which have transformed the nature of markets and drastically lowered the costs of social organization. Lower costs of sorting information on a massive scale have produced a transformation of several activities which characterized the twentieth century: mass markets, hits, the star system, and limited choice. The Long Tail explores the implications of the change from limited to unlimited shelf space. Here Comes Everybody describes the consequences and social implications of these dramatically lowered costs of organizing people for all forms of collective organization.

Of the three, Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” dwells best on the social implications of the new technologies. His major argument is that what used to be enormously difficult and expensive, such as social organization, has been rendered trivially easy. People can self-identify, collaborate, organize, sign-up, cooperate, and disperse, the prime example being Facebook. The fact that some things that used to be extremely difficult are now easy has grave implications for the professions. Professions exist, he says, to solve a problem of scarce knowledge and limited technical capacity. He argues that printed news media, and the journalists who go with them, are in the process of being eliminated. We do not need the news “profession” any longer. A profession exists to solve a technical problem, in this case, the scarcity of airwaves or printing presses. With the arrival of ubiquitous publishing and picture taking capacities in the general population, the profession of journalism is being gutted, like monks being thrown out of monasteries when printing replaced hand-writing as the way to produce books. The decline of newspaper advertising powerfully combines with increased amateur news collection to reduce reliance on newspapers.

Shirky speaks of the constant tendency of those of us born before 1980 to engage in obsolete behaviours: we get information from newspapers, look for jobs in want-ads, use a telephone to make a call, try to remember telephone numbers by writing them down and memorizing them, and so forth. He reminds us that all these behaviours are now obsolete. We will never again live in a world without calculators.

Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” examines the changes in markets wrought by advanced information technologies. First, he states, we did not know the nature of markets until we got rid of the constraints of shelf space. When perfect information came along, we perfected markets. The less the product in question is composed of atoms, the more perfectly the digital market place can work. But even physical objects can be found, discerned, advertised, sold and shipped with vastly greater efficiency thanks to the powers of computers. Anderson makes clear that we can expect fewer “hits” or “blockbusters” in the future. The obvious conclusion is that culture will be more fragmented than it was before it became computer-mediated.

“Planet Google” describes the ambitions of Google to organize all human knowledge, for instance, by digitizing all printed books, published at any time in human history. The Google project is expected to take about 300 hundred years, according to its President, Eric Schmidt. Its main achievement has been to link advertising directly to the expressed interests of the users of its search system. The old adage from the ad business: “Half my expenditure on advertising is wasted: I just don’t know which half” – is now obsolete. Google provides extremely focused advertizing to those who have indicated by their searches that they are already interested in the products or services being advertized.

Together the three books describe how new technologies spell the doom of television as we have experienced it. Several features come together to destroy the existing television model, including:

-the end of hits
-the infinite availability of all previous visual entertainment
- the targeting of advertising to patterns of consumption specific to the individual, not the general audience, which no longer will exist
- the end of the ability of content aggregators and government to shape demand by shaping the “shelf space”

To believe otherwise is to imagine that the same marketing revolutions that have changed book sales and records will somehow fail to change television. “Television” will be computerized. The rest is merely the working out of the implications.

Television programming is still, for most people, an affair defined by being in front of the television at the proper time (appointment television) to watch material whose costs are largely paid for by advertising. The rights market in television programs is carefully crafted by nationality and other features relevant to the interests of nation-states. All this is made necessary, and possible, by the fact that your television is still not a computer, and the aggregation, search, and sales functions are accordingly stuck in pre-computer capacities.

Aggregation: in the television era, aggregators are broadcasters, who buy programs and assemble then into schedules, and distributors, who assemble the individual schedules of broadcasters into packages of programs at various prices.

Search: Search functions are confined to print (weekly schedules) and barker channels. There is no point in searching more broadly than this week’s programming because no more is available. Shelf space is limited. You cannot download programs from previous years, or movies from previous decades, for instance. You cannot order them. The system is not designed to give you the same results as have already been achieved by booksellers.

Sales: “Sales” functions are equally primitive. The advertisers seek to assemble eyeballs for their messages. Purchasing video materials online is only possible through computers. Otherwise the purchase of programs requires a trip to a physical store where physical discs can be bought. The television set is barely capable of sustaining search, acquisition, and purchase functions, and only on the limited menu the aggregators provide.

By contrast, the Internet offers “infinite shelf space,” and infinite search capacity. There is no limit to the kinds of programming that can be summoned by viewers. The only constraints that apply to some programming derive from commercial arrangements among rights holders, the current aggregators, whom we call broadcasters. These rights are enforced by geo-blocking technologies that recognize your country by your IP address and decline to send you a program because your carrier or programmer had no rights to it. Absent those arrangements, viewers could summon any program from any period of time, so that a 1930s movie or the latest YouTube shenanigans would be available to you. In television terms, this would constitute infinite “fragmentation” of the viewing audience. In computer terms, this would constitute what Amazon books and its allied suppliers deal with every day.

Fragmentation is a word that implies unification. Like Hubble’s discovery that the universe is expanding, fragmentation implies that the television audience was once unified, and indeed this was once so. Though television never attained the unity of the audience which exists in North Korea, there was an era, which ended about 1960, when the television audience was divided among two or three channels. Television advertisers have adapted to the multi-channel universe only grudgingly. But even fifty “channels” of television is as nothing compared to billions of Internet Protocol addresses from which any kind of video entertainment could be summoned.

So the end of appointment television is in sight. The same technologies that govern book sales, and every form of on-line marketing, cannot fail to make themselves felt in video entertainment. Moreover, unlike books, where the searching and ordering functions are computerized, but the product is still physical, television is potentially digital at every stage of production, search, delivery and purchase.

By comparison to books and music, television’s ordering system is archaic. First, shelf space is limited – the paramount fact driving all else. The total available programming is what can be sustained by advertisers and subscription revenues across 50 or so channels, where the storage is in the viewer’s home, not distributed in massive digital warehouses. Because shelf space is limited, two things happen. First, the government and the distributors can shape what you watch by its organization of the shelf space. The viewer has only the most indirect of controls over “broadcasters” and “cable distribution undertakings” and other licensed entities, by his not watching the limited menu of programs selected by the aggregators. Second, the limitations of shelf space mean that search engines are unnecessary: the entire weekly schedule can be shown on a newsprint page.

The screen by which you watch will be powered by a computer, with all of the intelligence and capacities that go with it. Though we do not yet have the bandwidth into the home that would sustain completely the computer-driven model described here, we shall assuredly have it in place over the next decade or so. Infinite choice, search engines, and the ability to deliver any “programs” produced by professionals, video games or amateur productions, all on the same platform, all located by search engines, spell the infinite fragmentation of attention.

Does this matter? It depends on for whom the bell tolls.

For the viewer, the same functionality he has in every other digital domain will come to video entertainment. Every shift to computerization of the “television” system is a clear gain for choice.

For the broadcaster, the licenced aggregator, it will depend on whether we still need aggregators any longer, and whether they need to be licensed by the state as “broadcasters”. Market entry will be less complicated if a government licence is no longer required, but for reasons of state governments may still feel the need to limit who may become a visual programming aggregator, or what they may carry. Perhaps the more relevant limitation will be who gets access to the vast stores of programming from previous eras and other formats. That is a rights issue to be settled by lawyers and money. Advertizing will still work, but the advertizing will be custom designed for you and your expressed interests. Purchase or rent of the video entertainment may generate most of the revenue derived, just as it does with books and music.

For the distributor, whether it be a cable or a telephone company, it will depend on how the law perceives his function. If it is as a carrier, then the kind of legislation that applies to carriers will generally continue to apply. Normally these concern the regulation of discrimination and self-preference, and the exercise of market power.

But will there continue to be a need to regulate the distributor/carrier as an adjunct of the broadcasting system? In Canada, for instance, the cable and satellite companies are “broadcast distribution undertakings”, because the government finds it necessary to organize the limited available shelf space to promote Canadian content. In the absence of any constraints on shelf space, and with a near infinitude of programming located by search engines, such a category would seem obsolete. But it will take a few years to get to this stage.

Consequently, the change to “television” as we have known it is more than technical: the business model looks to become obsolete too, and rapidly. Why? The current model of television relies on:

• Limited video content, such as being limited to only the television content available on a given day, rather than all video content from any era,
• Limited formats, such as the fact that games and programs requiring different machines to play them;
• Limited capacity to search out and retrieve content; and
• Large audiences for each particular program, so as to attract advertising.

Every one of these technical and business assumptions is in the process of being rendered obsolete. The same revolution which has occurred in book sales and music will hit television. Computerization will overcome the limitations of shelf space. To the extent that television as we know has been predicated on these limitations, it will disappear and be reformed. Accordingly, when we re-examine broadcasting legislation, it is clear that we need to think in terms of “the long tail” – the end of limited supply – and the transformations of the book and music industries as models for what will happen to television.

Many governments stimulate supply by a number of subsidy and taxation measures in publishing and television. But they do not generally seek to influence who buys what book. The argument that governments ought to shape demand by organizing the visual shelf space seems as out of place here as it does in the book market. This does not mean that the same old forces which fostered and depended upon limited shelf space will not try hard to retain that governmental role.