The Death of TV in 3 parts

One of the ongoing conversations I often have with clients, friends and colleagues surrounds the current volatile media climate. We’re swimming in more and more mediated information, communications and creative work than ever before, yet the overall landscape is shifting under our feet. Everything seems to be in flux.

The Internet is touted to kill all other media, yet this has never happened before with new media and hasn’t happen now. The usual grand pronouncement that overstate the new in the near term and understate the new in the long term abound. We are awash in people telling us what’s happening, yet there seems less clarity than ever.

Here are a few other salient characteristics of the current discussion.

• A tremendous confusion exists between communications delivery mechanisms (over-air TV and radio signals, wireless Internet, wired TV and telephone lines), presentations modes (audio, video, text) and content created for a specific transmission mechanism
• on TV: sitcoms, dramas, policiers
• on radio: documentaries, radio plays and call-in shows
• on the web: short videos, blogs, podcasts and video podcasts
• Content and services are become divorced from delivery mechanisms. We can watch TV on the web, talk on the phone on the web, watch radio call-in shows on TV, listen to podcasts on radios, watch web videos on our TV.
• Content is become unbuckled from a schedule, shifting to being available on-demand for users to draw it rather than being sent out at a specific time only. Subscriptions are oriented to the content and not the carrier technology or channel.
• Copyright legalities are challenged by the practices of new technologies that make perfect replication simple, cheap and necessary.
• I hear or read people prognosticating on media everyday and often I wonder if they’ve ever tried the thing that they’re supposed to be an expert on. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, P2P networks, blogging and whatever else comes along have to be practiced to be appreciated. In a kind of return to the 4-H motto: Learn To Do By Doing.

Into this conversation I was lucky enough this week to find a presentation by Gary Carter called The Death of TV. Here is Part 2 and here is Part 3. His point about communication devices moving through stages of domestication is lucid and wonderful. His clarity once he arrives at digital transmission and storage technologies makes me wish I’d written some of his speech. To whit:

This is the world of digital television, digital networks, digital everything. Power, in this environment, is certainly not a push, but it’s probably not, in fact, a pull: it is distributed equally, in all parts of the system, acting in all directions simultaneously. In fact, power is a peer-to-peer distributed network. The audience, having been first the recipient of the camera’s gaze, and then its subject, took control first of the means of production, and now, finally, of the means of distribution.

Media has become totally personalised, in all its aspects. It has moved into ‘my space’. The artist formerly known as the audience has become—to use MacLuhan’s prediction from the early ‘70s—the prosumer. To quote Andy Warhol just before his death: “My prediction from the Sixties finally came true. In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, in fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”

Or, everyone will be famous to 15 people.

So go, read that full text of Carter’s speech if you’re at all interested in the conversation on our current mediated communications. And if you’re reading this, you already are.

Thanks to MIT Advertising Lab for formatting and posting the text of the speech.

Strangely, the 4-H Club motto seems to have changed over time and now seems to be the odd, vague, Orwellian To Make the Best Better.