Not a media revolution

At the Observer, Simon Caulkin comments on the aspirations of old media to understand new media (via Buzzmachine):

"Take the rise of the bloggers. This is no simple accident of technology, but the price newspapers are paying for having treated readers as passive consumers without bothering to find out more about them as news users. In the same way, artificial TV reality shows are being challenged by the mushrooming growth of permanent reality spaces like YouTube, MySpace, Etribes and others, and 3D virtual-reality sites such as Second Life.

No one knows where these trends will end. Of course, traditional media companies are pitching in to buy up anything with Web 2.0 pretensions, however remote. But as the AOL-Time Life debacle graphically showed, there is no necessary synergy between old and new media, and unless attitudes to customers change radically, they may find that the benefits of innovation are not easily bought."

Which once again shows that if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, and if you have a media company, everything looks like media. But the digital revolution isn't a media revolution: as Doug Rushkoff argues and Terry Heaton paraphrases, "the web is a social phenomenon, not a media phenomenon or a technological phenomenon".

Aside from Google (which is admittedly an elephant-sized anomaly but not a relevant one since it was mere chance that it stumbled on a business model before it went bankrupt), the digital revolution has been about communication and not about media.

The first wave of the digital revolution was about the killer ap - email - and the scale went to the providers of that communication platform, Yahoo! and AOL and Hotmail (which Microsoft grievously wasted, but then MSN has never even got as far as being a media company, yet alone made the requisite next step). The second has been about another sort of persistent digital identity, for the generation of digital natives who abandoned email and took up social networks as their communications/identity platform of choice. None of this has been about media, or at least about content which is what media in the pre-digital sense was about. Media has (is) a hammer, and so...the digital revolution still looks like media, to commentators and purchasers and, now, owners. But it isn't.