Tag: umair haque

Required Reading: 2008-04-11

I’m starting a new feature called Required Reading. I already offer what I call the Media 2.0 Reader (in the sidebar) that tracks selected reading from around the web (via Google Reader). Required Reading will represent the best of the best. Frankly, I wish I’d written these pieces!

Today, two pieces of Required Reading with an economic perspective:

The Declining Power of the Firm
I’m already a big Umair Haque fan, and in this post Wilson pulls from a recent Haque piece and then extends it into issues swirling in the Microsoft / Yahoo! / Google / AOL story. What does it mean to public media? Well, the economics of the emerging edgeconomy are fundamentally what’s shattering the foundations of the mass media market in which we historically operate.

Microeconomics
Rosenblum’s writing is provocative and intelligent. You don’t have to agree, but you do have to confront his ideas. In this case, Rosenblum takes on the notion that new media services only pull in a fraction of their old media forerunners. He acknowledges the situation, but points out how new media also costs far less to produce than old media, in particular with respect to overhead costs. Given that many in public media work in large and expensive legacy facilities — especially in pubTV shops — this lesson will be increasingly critical to learn and then to turn into real-world practice.

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If you’re interested in wider-ranging readings across the web, you can follow my Media 2.0 Reader via RSS or by e-mail subscription. By the way, I’m always on the prowl for more and better sources of ideas and material related to new media, social media and public media, so be sure to share your recommended links.

Inverted orbits

I’ll be explaining and exploring the purpose of this site in the coming days, but before I get into it too deeply, I want to start with a quote from the incomparable Umair Haque:

“…connected consumers … want firms to be citizens of their microcultures.”

This notion and its implications are the central subject of this site, though I’ll use a variety of metaphors to explore it. Such as astronomical metaphors.

I’ll be paying attention specifically to public media companies and how they’re affected by and can change to embrace the sweeping inversion of how media is both distributed and consumed in the opening decades of the 21st century.

Short Version: In the past, PBS and NPR and their associated local media outlets were the centers of their media solar systems. They pushed out lots of heat and energy and had such tremendous mass that viewers and listeners were pulled into orbit around them.

But now the solar system metaphor is inverting.

In an expanding media universe, the viewers and listeners and readers — the users — are at the center of their own solar systems, and the “gravity” of their attention pulls in media services of all kinds, commercial and noncommercial alike. Where once we were the sun, today we are mere planets. Or if we fail to change, we’ll be comets, snuffed out after a few passes.

Never again will we — the public media purveyors — be the star at the center of the solar system. We must now begin to authentically grapple with this reversal of media economics and change our DNA (another Haquism) to engage with the public in new ways. We may not be the center any longer, but perhaps we can be an important planet in our users’ solar systems.

Maybe that’s a good introduction, and maybe not. Stay tuned for more. And comment away if that made absolutely no sense.