The future, Sarah?
In spite of Caincross's 30-year divide from our current time, he was incredibly perceptive about the state of technology and where the landscape was taking society. Now that we've seen the result of his predictions, let me take a crack at "trendspotting" for our next 30 years.
Social Media will be like the cell phone, it's going to continue to change and evolve rapidly and conform to its users. Although Facebook has been very successful at obtaining a huge membership for a consistent period of time, a study in Business Insider indicated stagnation in growth, with a possibility of decline. Social Media is all about youth, and todays youngest users are not using just one platform, but many. Social Media brands, like Ford and Chevy of its time, entertained prominence for awhile because of the infancy of the market, but now that its growing, we'll see new players on an annual, or even more frequent, basis, and "what's hot" constantly being in a state of flux, just like the App market.
In terms of Entertainment, all markets are in the process of undergoing a huge shift from traditional modes to new streaming. Eventually, I foresee a merging of the film and television industries; there will no longer be a separation for "large" and "small" screen productions. Everything will be streamed online through various services that will lobby production companies for streaming rights, and customers will have to pay for each separately. The movie theater industry will completely collapse and reformat itself into "special event" houses where customers will choose to see a product on the big screen such as big-special effects productions, but will be simultaneously released on streaming. The streaming system will subsidized revenues for high-production motion pictures and allow the cost of special event movie theater pricing to come down.
It's clear that technology is transforming the world we live in on a consistent basis. The future holds a lot of questions, but evolving trends can be identified just as Caincross was able to.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Addressing Caincross's Trendspotting
Now that we've detailed the nature of the genre's at hand, let's dive in to Caincross's "trends."
Frances Caincross cited 30 trends to watch for in the 1980s with the burgeoning new communication technologies on the horizon. With entertainment and Social Media, some of the identified trends are applicable to both genres, others to one or the other, and some not at all, but are overall starkly accurate in the grand reality of technology.
1. Death of Distance
In terms of Social media, this theory describes the state of Social Media to its core. Social Media allows free flowing communication and information sharing throughout the world. There's no related cost to inter- or cross-continental communication, nor is one limited based on where they live, with the exception of autocratic government intervention. Entertainment has benefited from this death of distance, with world citizens having access to all forms and no longer barred from access based on their location (legal or not). The only fallacy in this prediction was the timezones; yes, the world is based in timezones, but it's not particularly centered around three specific areas. Things happen as they happen, where they happen. A lot of business is circumvented around the U.S. and therefore adapted to their time specifications, but I wouldn't put this in the frame of Americas, Europe and Asia/Australia.
2. The Fate of Location
Though this theory is applicable to the world at large, Social Media and Entertainment aren't really a part of the equation. Social Media definitely has a rootless existence, but overall, both Entertainment and Social Media are domestic products.
3. The Irrelevance of Size
Entertainment can be said to have some impact in this arena. Prior technological developments of the last decade, most of entertainment was relegated to be created by large production houses. Technological improvements have allowed equipment to become smaller and less cumbersome in use and the cost has decreased dramatically, enabling individuals and small groups to create high quality content once only made in Hollywood.
4. Improved Connections
Caincross comes across as borderline clairvoyant in this theory. He describes a system of interactive "switches" like the telephone where subscribers can contact each other. He then explicitly says the Internet will adapt to the abilities of the television and the telephone.
Mic-drop. This is exactly what Social Media is and what Entertainment is becoming. Social Media is user-generated content through interaction over the internet. People can do anything, including video conference, with one another through this platform. In terms of TV, it's here: streaming television. Netflix, HULU, Yahoo Screen, Amazon Prime are just the beginning.
5. Customized Content
Another perfectly foreseen conclusion. This second decade of the new millenia can almost be personified as the years of customization. Both Social Media and new Entertainment models are pushing out traditional, singular, fixed models for choice: from cable subscriptions to online streaming, traditional radio to streaming radio, newspapers for social media headlines; what they want when they want it.
6. Deluge of Information
Here, Caincross predicts the influx of businesses into Social Media. Businesses have seized on the Social Media trend to diversify their advertising strategies and attempt to market themselves to a new generation. With ailing traditional media also comes the suffering of advertising revenue and effectiveness, and have now turned to a new resource for "branding".
7. Increased Value of Branding
This theory has some value but also misses the mark a bit. Branding does have a high affinity in this current market, particularly with the changing advertising climate. What he misses is the cost variable. He describes the cost for promotion to stay the same, but he's incorrect; one of the great powers of branding today is, thanks to social media, it can cost NOTHING. Simply having a following and a Twitter page can generate revenue, of which he did correctly predict in identifying the "super-rich" celebrities.
8. Increased Value of Niches
"Niche", while in some arenas has become the common place, is also fought against in others, particularly with Entertainment. Television has become all about the niche, with the concept of "narrowcasting" taking the focus of the medium away from broadcast, large viewership to cable and/or streaming, small, high-intensity fandoms. In film, however, the opposite has become true. Once a market for artistic endeavors, the movie production has become so expensive and less in-demand that niche audience films are not being green-lit. (Buchman, 2014)
The 22 other trends almost all hit on similar notes of strength as the ones assessed here. Some offer greater weaknesses, like 14, which assumes business will become easier and cheaper to start, and 20, where government surveillance is less of an issue and harder to impose. These completely disregard economic and political factors, and, unfortunately, the nature of 9/11 that made government surveillance a hallmark in today's America. Overall, Caincross's predictions contained great foresight and, majority speaking, came to fruition in some form of another and apply greatly to the technological society we've come to live in and enjoy.
When did your mom get a Facebook?
I really went on tangent about Entertainment in that last post! Of course, there's one other genre to cover that I can't neglect: Social Media.
Even though we do so very extensively for this class, Social Media analysis is very strange to discuss, because we're still living and breathing its presence and impact on the world on a daily basis. Though its technical inception was in the early 1990s and continued to grow through the decade and into the early 2000s, the Social Media Revolution underwent a palpable shift with the establishment of Facebook in 2004. Originally designed for communication among Harvard University students, the social media site underwent swift expansion to the point where membership is nearly ubiquitous.
Following Facebook's lead, Media Now identifies many other sites that have become popular in the Facebook era, including Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Google+, and Wikipedia (273). Thanks to these sites, users are able to generate content, share, and communicate across unique platforms. What was once a strictly entertainment/communication arena has now transcended into commercial business. Almost every company has a social media presence of some kind, and its success is yet to be determined.
Social Media has redefined almost every aspect of life. A person can now talk to friends, play games, share photos, and get news updates not only from the comfort of their own home, but from ONE platform.
Social Media challenges all our previous conceptions about communication, is the effect is still an ongoing discovery.
I'll take a free album and a cat video, please.
Welcome back! Thanks
for keeping up with our “Trendspotting” analysis, instigated by Mr. Frances
Caincross and his theories of new communication technology from the 1980s. I
last teased the two genres we would be using to test Caincross’s theories, of
which I selected Entertainment and Social Media. To gain some insight to these
broad categories, lets take a closer look.
The Entertainment
genre in Media Now touches on the changes of mass entertainment, particularly
with consumption of movies, music, and television. The Internet redefined
entertainment, to put it mildly; prior to the Internet and the introduction of
broadband, entertainment was relegated to other forms of NCTs, all with
specific purposes and outlets. Films were watched in a movie theater, music was
heard on the radio, and television was watch on… television. Of course,
physical forms of these came into
existence too: films made it on to cassette tapes in the 1970s and
eventually evolved into other technologies like laser discs and DVDS; music was
the first form of art to take on physical form, beginning with the gramophone
and ending with the CD; and television, like film, also eventually became a DVD
enterprise.
The construct of the
Internet and its users, however, challenged each medium and its controlling
interests. Music was the first to revolutionize, when three, young, tech-savvy
individuals created a peer-to-peer sharing service that enabled users to “file
share”, leading to the service that became known as “Napster” (Business Week, 2004). This ability to “share” permitted – although deemed illegal in later
court rulings – individuals to download music files without purchasing a
physical copy. This began the age of “piracy”, where copyrighted material is
obtained without the permission or consent of the creator visa vie the
Internet. Despite the bountiful legal precedent established in the early 2000s
against piracy, this capability enabled through Internet access started a
domino effect that would affect the entire entertainment industry, including
film and television.
Piracy was not just an
ethical challenge to modern laws and copyright, represented the beginning of
the departure from the physical into the abstract. Almost all music is consumed
online today in the form of streaming or downloading. Television syndication is
quickly becoming a hallmark of online streaming sites like HULU and Netflix,
and is now venturing into original content. Film has been more stubborn to
adapt, and has suffered the consequences. In 2012, Edelman published a survey
stating only 3% of households attend movies in a theater “frequently,” down
from 28% in 2010 (Deadline, 2012).
What’s most important
is that we have the Internet to thank for the creation of this beautiful
platform that provides bits of joy such as these:
Flavors of the Internet
In Frances
Caincross's book The Death of Distance, Caincross devotes a
chapter titled "The Communications Revolution" that delves into the
nature of the ever-changing world of communication technology and the potential
societal changes that may come from such change. The book was written in 1980;
at the time, he was examining the ramifications of distance communication and
how telephones, televisions, and the burgeoning Network computer would affect
society. In spite of being 4 years from the birth of the personal computer, and
27 years from the first iPhone, his "Trendspotter's Guide to New
Communication" makes some fascinating and accurate assertions that came to
fruition.
In order
to understand Caincross's projections and see if he was truly clairvoyant (ha),
it's important we investigate NCTs in the present and get a sense for where
technology has taken us. The most prescient, important, utilized and
scrutinized form of new communication technology today is the Internet. What
began as an internetwork of computers at a university in the late 1960s has
blossomed into a communication platform that the majority of the world depends
on for daily livelihood and commerce (Gromov, 1995) As the platform has
progressed, the Internet has taken on various characteristics of content that
authors Straubbar, LaRose and Davenport describe in Media Now as
the "genres" within the World Wide Web (268).
The
Internet, in its complexity and nearly-infinite capacity, delves in to many
variations of content; a mere Google search (a part of the “Search Engine”
genre) will render almost any subject millions of possibilities, and, in some
cases, billions. Part of the wonderment of the Internet is its sheer vastness
and its immense accessibility, and the fact that almost every individual who
engages with it can customize the experience and explore the globe through
their screen and keyboard. Although the new communication technology has a
notable breadth to its resources, Media
Now identifies 8 broad overarching principles that cover many broad topics
within the online community: Electronic Publishing, Entertainment, Online
Games, Portals, Search Engines, Social Media, Blogs, and Electronic Commerce.
I’d love
to investigate all 8 subject matters, but for the purpose of this blog, I will
concentrate on the two genres: Entertainment and Social Media. Both of these
areas of interest have brought about a lot of change in their own right, both
in how they’ve come to exist in the Internet age and their ability to upset the
status quo of traditional standards.
We’ll
take a closer look in the next blog go-‘round, stay tuned!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)