The Media Business: Seeing through the Haze Surrounding Websites, Blogs and Social Media

Media economist Robert Picard provides some notes of caution about easy assumptions that blogging and Twitter are the future of media.

Seeing through the Haze Surrounding Websites, Blogs and Social Media

Communicating regularly is hard work. It takes skill; it takes a voice; it takes having something to say; it takes time. Making money from it is even harder.

The functions provided by websites, blogs, and social media clearly make it possible for people to express themselves in ways never before imagined, to share their opinions, to express their hopes and dreams, and to share the details of their lives. Media companies are watching these developments and many are rushing to provide content on any communication technology or application the public uses.

Although large numbers of people are trying the new technologies, they are reacting to them in different ways. Some find them highly useful and satisfying; some find them worthless and disappointing; some find them a worthy pastime; others find them a waste of time. What this means is that—like all technologies—they are more important to some people than to others. Consequently, managers need to be realistic in assessing their potential, the extent to which they are being used by the public, and the extent to which they provide opportunities that media companies should pursue.

Because those promoting the technologies are self interested, uptake figures are easy to come by. Finding out who has tried the technologies, but decided they were undesirable is harder. However, research is showing some interesting results in that regard. We now know that 60 percent of the people who try Twitter stop using it within a month, that only about 5% of blogs are regularly updated, that more than 200 million blogs have been abandoned, and that about 37 million web domain names are deleted every year.

Most people and organizations who try these new communication opportunities make limited use of them or give up on them altogether because of boredom or because the opportunities don't provide sufficient results. This is not to say they are not unimportant, however. A good number of individuals and companies are using them to create new abilities and opportunities to communicate with friends, colleagues, and customers and to establish new businesses and revenue streams. Doing so, however, takes commitment that most people and firms are unwilling to make.

From the business standpoint one has to be realistic when evaluating the opportunities presented. Media executives need to ask hard questions: Do all media companies need to provide content across every available platform regardless of the cost and effort? Are all types of news and information appropriately carried on all platforms? In what ways is branding and marketing for the company actually served by these engagements? How are these monetized? What are the returns on the investments? What are the risks of not engaging these technologies?

Success is not easy in this technological environment. It requires investment, effort, regular activity, and provision of content that people want. Media managers choosing to use these new technologies must be clear-headed in their decisions and pursue well-founded strategies or they will be lost in the maze of competing and alternative opportunities.

ANZCA Conference - Day 2

Day 2 of ANZCA at the slightly warming up Wellington. As a member of the ANZCA Executive, and Vice-President-elect (which means hosting the conference at QUT in Brisbane next year), I have spent a lot of time in Executive meetings dealing with Constitutional changes. What fun! As I wryly observed, the Weimar Constitution of 1919 was considered the leading constitutional document of its time, yet didn't stop Hitler from coming to power in Germany 14 years later.

The keynote speaker was Professor Jennifer Craik, my PhD supervisor when at Griffith, and her presentation was titled "The Empresses' New Clothes: Dressing Women for Politics". I'm afraid to say it, but I was disappointed by Jenni's talk. It relied too much on the entertaining nature of the visuals, and the perceived frivolity of public discourse about women, power and fashion, ad in my view didn't engage with the material at a deeper level. I know that Jenni's work can do this - I just felt that the paper presented was a bit too easy to play to the punters and not intellectually tax people too much.

I caught a very good paper by Jim McNamara from the Australian Centre for Public Communication at UTS in Sydney, who did a study with his students of e-electioneering in the 2007 Australian Federal election. A lot of good stuff in this, and the report can be downloaded here.

Forthcoming events

I have now returned to U. Indiana - Bloomington after the International Communications Association conference in Montreal.

Forthcoming events that I will be attending include:

• Creating Value- Between Commerce and Commons - 25-27 June 2008, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, Brisbane, Australia. This conference is being hosted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.
• Power and Place, the Australia and New Zealand Communications Association Conference - 9-11 July 2008, being held at the Duxton Hotel, Wellington, New Zealand, and being hosted by Massey University.
  

For those planning ahead for 2009, a series of important event will be happening in Australia in July. I will be organising the 2009 ANZCA Conference in Brisbane, which provisionally has the dates of 8-11 July and will be at the Creative Industries Precinct, QUT Kelvin Grove. The working title is "Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship".

This will coincide with:

• 2009 Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program to be held at QUT in Brisbane from 5-18 July. The contact for OII 2009 (which will be in Winter rather than summer in the Southern Hemisphere) is Dr. Marcus Foth.
  
• 2009 ICA Regional Conference to be held in Melbourne from July 16-17. The conference will be titled Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalization and National Identity, and the contact is Professor Ingrid Volkmer. A call for abstracts will be issued shortly.
  

The combination of events should lead to an attractive group of speakers coming from outside of Australia and New Zealand in July of next year.

Ecological media studies?

I am at the International Communications Association conference in Montreal. It is currently the pre-conference, and I am attending the sessions on 'Mediating Global Citizenship'.

The opening keynote was by Professor Toby Miller from U. California (Riverside). Toby is an ex-pat Aussie and very well known in Australian media and cultural studies circles.

Toby's provocative presentation argued that media studies is on the wrong track in demanding more speech and more rights to communicate as a condition of cultural citizenship. Instead, he emphasised the global ecological consequences of extending the technologies that enable more communication (laptops, iPods, mobile phones, wireless networks etc.). The point is made that Apple, the coolest of the new media giants, also most likely has the most ecologically destructive production practices across its globally networked production system.

I have provided my notes below but, as is often the case with Toby's work, it is a well-aimed broadside at dominant tendencies in media studies, including the work of myself and my colleagues pursuing the 'creative industries' agenda. Obviously in my mind is the thought that some of htis is easier if you come from a material base that allows you to forego worldly goods (and Toby acknowledged that he certainly doesn't do this, having 4 laptops and 4 iPods), but harder in the developing world where these symbols of modernity are becoming available for the first time.

The paper on which the talk was based can be found in the International Journal of Communication, and was co-authored by Richard Maxwell.

International Communications Association
58th Annual Conference, Communication for Social Change, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 21-28 May

Pre-Conference Workshop: Mediating Global Citizenship – May 21-22 2008

Toby Miller (UC Riverside), May 21

• Rethink media studies in context of environment and citizenship
• Media studies caught in a technological sublime
• Governed by principle that more speech is good – it may not be – it may be bad

Three kinds of citizenship
1. Political: the state/representation - rights
2. Economic: standard of living – material interests
3. Cultural: right to know and to speak – communication/representation

These partly overlap – ‘citizenship, employment, literacy’

• Cultural citizenship is not the apogee of these – economic citizenship is vital – media studies seek more (growth ethic) – focus on numbers – grafted onto the growth complex of economic theory – more discourse
• New theoretical direction for media studies needed from green citizenship – critique of territorial citizenship and capitalist modernity
• Media eco-ethics – Miller & Maxwell – International Journal of Communication

• Media technology has been key indicator of modernity and its doom-laden portent - seen as opening up new democratic possibilities as well as unknown personal/consumer needs (utopia/dystopia) – media studies sublime as decontextualized technological fantasy

• Postmodern guarantee of right to communicate is at the core of environmental degradation and needs to be investigated e.g. exposure of iPod production workers to environmental hazards in four countries (lead, mercury etc.) – harder to track their composite production histories; also built-in obsolescence

• 2% of carbon emissions worldwide come from global information & communications industries – equivalent to aviation

• News Corp – aims to be carbon-neutral by 2010 – relationship to climate change denial in News Corp outlets (FOX)

• New ‘post-smokestack era of industry’ – CHASS submission to Productivity Commission (Australia)

• Environment talked about in media studies in terms of representation, not death and disability – forgets relationship between media technologies and science

Four Ecological Contexts of Contemporary Media Technology
1. Energy consumption
2. Plastics in manufacture
3. Producing of inputs (e.g. electro-magnetic spectrum)
4. Dumping of waste (‘effluent for the affluent’ – e-waste)

• ‘Deodorization of public space’ is globally stratified – e.g. Lagos as a dumping ground for old computers; coastal deltas of China – the ‘ragpicker’ as a figure for global citizenship from below.