The season for predictions and historical reflections is upon us, and as difficult as it is to tackle forecasts in the absence of historical perspective, it is much more so when the historical perspective is murky. For the decade that just ended, in the media sector that we’re in, there is plenty of murkiness to go around as the old became ancient and the new became old and then all of these converged to become something different still. To figure things out in such an environment is no easy task, but we all try our best. This, then, is the first of three related articles, because it can take at least that many, in an attempt to cast light on what could be ahead for media in the new decade. To begin, a glance at the past:
After ten years that started with Time Warner’s acquisition of AOL and ended with Time Warner’s spinoff of the same at a massively reduced price, that began with a monumental market collapse and ended with another that was even worse… while we now have a Facebook page with party pictures and privacy settings and a mobile device with lots of apps… After a decade in which Google still dominates search, Microsoft still dominates the enterprise, and San Francisco still dominates technology… After such a decade one might argue that, on a certain level, nothing much has really happened. And yet, the disruption has been massive.
We don’t yet have the distant overview of time, living through the disruption each day as we are, but we already suspect with good reason that the Internet has in the past ten years changed our world on more numerous levels than we can truly appreciate. In an age defined by its scientific and political evolution, referring now to the last century or so, communication in its multitude of manifestations – from personal communiqué, to data exchange, to entertainment and propaganda, and all variants and combinations of these – will have been a (perhaps, the) centerpiece. So, in such an age, when information of any kind and format is suddenly made available immediately, perfectly, and interactively, from any point to any other point in the world, and (this next aspect is key) at virtually no cost to the user, then the world will have become very different very quickly. The influence of this medium, the Internet, now has to be factored into any serious analysis of virtually anything, which wasn’t even yet the case in the late 90s.
With this backdrop, that the Time Warner and AOL combination occurred and dissolved while Google and Microsoft continued to dominate in their regions, are observations that take on more numerous dimensions than of a merely competitive atmosphere, strictly speaking. These are case studies that now not only demonstrate successful or failed transitions from old models to new, but underscore successful or failed formations of global influence in record time. That Facebook now boasts 350 million worldwide users, after being in business some five years, is an even sharper illustration of both the scope and the pace of media evolution in this era in which media, as noted, is a centerpiece. And with this backdrop, again, the extent and speed with which capital markets have built up and then shattered financial bubbles, in the same approximate ten-year period, can no longer be an isolated coincidence.
In short, a decade of media explosion in a communication-centric global environment is apt to go hand in hand with, if not give rise to, such changes, transference, and volatility, that may be without precedent and manifest on multiple levels. Such has been the decade we have just come out of, or at least such is one interpretation of it. While this overview may strike some as recasting older analysis or historical commentary found elsewhere, it serves as a bit of groundwork for subsequent articles about the future. By definition, these will be more original. In the next installment, we move from platitudes to practical realities. Please stay tuned.
