What the Media is Doing Tomorrow

Over the course of the last few weeks and through to the middle of May, the television networks have been carrying out their upfront presentations with major advertisers in New York. But as AP television reporter David Bauder notes, the timing of these meetings could not be worse for the networks. He cites a recent study which shows that "more than 2.5 million fewer people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last year." Further, Bauder notes, "NBC set a record last month for its least-watched week during the past 20 years, and maybe ever then broke it a week later."

With figures like that, it becomes fairly difficult to deny the fact that we are in the midst of a cultural transformation. An optimist might even suggest that we may be beginning to experience a revolution of consciousness. A pessimist would indicate that we're probably just collectively coming to terms with the reality that there is nothing worth watching on television. I find it hard to argue with either point. As is usually the case with significant phenomena, there is certainly more than one factor at work in the function of this change.

If we can assert that traditional structures of television viewing have ceased to offer a fructifying identificatory resource to the culture, what is most interesting to think about is: what happens next? The 2.5 million viewers who have tuned out over the past year join a vast populous of culturati carving out new senses of self in the modern media matrix, simultaneously patching together the most logical forms of meaning making and waiting for someone or something to make sense of it all. If necessity is the mother of invention, in this mild crisis/celebration of cultural chaos, what technologies will we turn to next to make sense of our lives in the contemporary world?

One suggestion is the forthcoming media marketplace formally known as Joost. Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, founders of Skype and Kazaa, have collaborated to offer one of the more exciting commercial ventures to arrive in recent memory. Applying the same fundamental technologies at work in P2P file sharing, P2PTV will allow content providers to distribute their "television" programming on-demand to broadband users. This is probably the first significant unveiling of Internet television and it will be exciting to see how well this experiment pans out. There are indeed a series of other sites offering this kind of service, from YouTube, to Brightcove, to Veoh Networks and Sling Media to name a few, but none with the sheer commercial velocity boasted by the Joost venture.

Internet television is the new kid on the media block. The ontology of television viewership is about to change drastically and it is likely to have a significant impact on the way television content is produced and received. A few years down the line it is not hard to imagine that we might all be interacting with a commingled batch of televised and web-based content on machines that look something like Jeff Han's reification of the technology most popularly represented in the film "Minority Report."

It is exciting and bewildering to think about the unpredictable ways these new technologies will effect media production and ethics. We will certainly begin to obtain a more realistic understanding of what sort of programming is popular. Ratings will finally begin to reflect real people's viewing habits. This mark of interactivity creates a whole new kind of media ethics.

What if media we have traditionally considered to be taboo and intolerable becomes the most popular content available? Will commercial interests fundamentally change the nature of the public sphere? Will the capacity to measure specific users viewing choices structure the society in more inclusive or exclusive ways? Will there be any detectable difference at all? It is hard to say, and hopefully we will know very soon, but for now I am content to wonder about what the media will be doing tomorrow.