About Gravity Medium
Through this site I’d like to explore issues affecting public media companies as we attempt to make the transition from the massconomy (Umair Haque) to the attention economy. In a world of ubiquitous and direct digital media distribution, where content is cheap, how do we serve the public interest in new and meaningful ways that carry real value and can be financially sustained?
In thinking about these issues, three words feel especially important to me:
- content
- contact
- context
Content is what public media companies used to do; content is what we used to “own” in the relationship with our communities. We controlled content delivery in a one-way top-down distribution model. That content gave us to power to manipulate delivery both for public good and to create an income stream.
Contact is what we lack, being one-way Media 1.0 companies. Sure, we’ve had community contact in small doses (volunteers, pledge drives, in-person events), but it was never a core goal, nor was it an affordable public engagement model — until now.
Context is what matters most in a world where content is free, ubiquitous, and available on demand. When something is “in context” for me, then it matters to me and I will pay for it, with either “attention” or even with real cash. Content + context = value. Contact + context = value. Anything without context is a distraction and carries either no value or negative value.
Public media companies that fail to deal with the issues of content, contact and context in terms of their public service are likely to fail rapidly as communities and markets reformulate around these new media value chains. If we ignore the strategic issues at hand, we are begging new public service media entities to displace us in time.
Of course, I could be nuts. But that’s why blogs have commenting features, right?
By the way, the name “Gravity Medium” came about for three reasons:
- Gravity to me was a conceptual way to refer to the attraction between two bodies based on mass and distance, not as it relates to physics, but as it relates to people interacting with one another
- Medium because I wanted to focus on media, but also as an expression of the open space that exists between the two bodies mentioned above; the medium in which the gravity is expressed is important
- Because gravitymedia.com was taken
