Chatalas Shrugged

There’s great subject matter in Gillmor’s We The Media. This topic is fascinating to me, including our chapter about professional journalists utilizing citizen media. While traditional media companies have been apprehensive to embrace citizen media, they’re doing so at their own peril. Not only are they missing opportunities to engage with their audience, but also to provide better news coverage.

Among the many subjects in this chapter, the local angle resonates greatly with me. Heading forward, I think local news is going to be the information that community members desire the most. The local media will be wise to embrace the citizens’ views and willingness to be active. To some extent, media actually already do so fairly decently. The Seattle P-I “Soundoff” feature is quite good… readers respond to local news stories. The Seattle Times has some great blogs… David Postman’s on politics and Geoff Baker’s on the Mariners, in particular. Both these blogs have loyal readers who comment regularly, creating a larger conversation and relationship. Still, we’re not seeing very much citizen-generated material yet in either paper. King 5 does that a bit better on its website, but it still makes clear that the provided content has absolutely no connection to King.

I think there are great opportunities to train citizen media practitioners, and that will in-turn help create more active community members. The big question is what business and revenue opportunities will come about to motivate this. I’ve done many community newsletters, but scant advertising dollars amount to covering basic costs in a labor of love. One idea I think has considerable merit, that I want to study closely during the program, is the creation of what I’ll call a Community News Network. This would be an online center of community and local news. Community members would submit content as articles, blog entries, video posts, interviews, and more. It could be the common stop for local coverage, by the citizens who know their communities best. There are some models of this underway which I’ll look forward to studying further.

Questions for Discussion:

• Why are established media hesitant to fully embrace citizen media and open conversation with the citizenry?
• What inspires citizens to create content for others?
• What sorts of citizen content is most interesting and effective?
• What media organizations are doing an admirable job in utilizing the citizenry, and how?

The Atlantic Monthly, a great publication to this day, apparently scored a coup with Vannevar Bush’s article. He clearly was a visionary man, basing his forecasts on experience and applied insight. I appreciate his exhortations that society and scientists have to assume that technology will advance us, and that it’s necessary to look forward. There’s no doubt this article and his predictions were seen as remarkable in 1945. Reading it now, it’s a long list of innovations that have come to be in some fashion… cameras, calculators, photocopiers, credit card technology. The article is a bit challenging to follow mainly because he’s trying to describe subjects that in 1945 were merely being envisioned.

I like his point about significant advancements getting lost in the mass of inconsequential. In a different way, I see this regularly as I get news and information on the internet. There’s so much out there that I fall back on regular sources… likely missing out on wonderful articles and commentary that would pique my interest. Yes, the internet and blogs are great with links, but at what point do you refrain from following all of them?

Speaking of blogs, I loved a line in The Victorian Internet by a newsman considering the effect of the telegraph: The only role left for print would be to comment on the news and provide analysis. That’s exactly what we’re saying now about blogs… they’re using news stories to create commentary for the most part, although some are doing original reporting.

I found much of interest in Christensen, too. It made sense that Moore’s law, by being linear, would eventually result in overshooting the market… too much power for too high a price. And I liked that the processes entailed in manufacturing the improved chips takes months, but that was okay because the processors in computers already last long enough to accommodate the delay.

Questions for discussion:

• Christensen says that the semiconductor companies see customer needs as predictable. In what ways are our habits predictable to companies seeking our patronage?
• As computers and applications become more powerful, at what point might we fall into the category of the overshot consumer… no longer willing to pay for unnecessary power?
• How do we establish what ideas for the future have merit? What makes an innovation theory realistic vs. folly?

Our group had a question directly related to our cellular phone use. Since this topic is so current and in the forefront of our lives, the discussion flowed freely… and the all-class conversation was lively, too. Here’s a summary of the major points…

How has your mobile phone affected (+/-) your personal and professional relationships?

• Accessible, yet that can also be a drawback and overwhelming (Rheingold makes this point).

• Gives you freedom to ignore or answer. Customers may get priority. Caller id a utilized tool. Won’t necessarily answer, if can’t identify.

• Guilt feelings at times, though, as voicemail accumulates after not answering.

• Some have personal phone, and one for word. Separate is good.

• Harder to get commitments for getting together; people can quickly change or cancel meeting plans, until almost the meeting time.

• Easy to locate friends in crowds.

• Stress relief to some extent… don’t have to worry as much about every call since it’s always easy to contact people.

• Due to the power of cell phones, we don’t memorize phone numbers anymore.

Why do you own a mobile phone?

All the obvious answers, but interesting in a sociological approach because the factors can apply to most new technology.

• Convenience

• Portability

• Accessibility to others, and others to you

• Powerful appliance… texting, cameras, etc.

• Financial – No longer need home phone

• Safety… Find you if you drive over a cliff

• Societal… everybody has one.
How old is it?

• Two were relatively new: One year.

• Two work cell phones were two years old.

• Two personal phones, owned by those with work cell phones, were 1-3 months

• Another phone was ancient… three years old. Wow… does that thing still work?

• Average… 112 months divided by seven phones… 1.33 months old.

When it comes to non-market factors, the basic circumstances are pretty obvious and well-documented. Government regulation is clearly the most prominent and has the most impact, but to varying degrees so do unions, culture, and industry standards. Government policy typically is labeled as detrimental to business, but Christensen points out that it actually contributes to innovation. Regulation is front and center on the subject of net-neutrality, where many are fighting for laws to ensure the internet freedoms we currently enjoy. As the telecom companies that provide internet access move to solidify their profits and growth, net neutrality supporters fret over tiered pricing (which would enable telecoms to give the best service to those who pay the most) and discrimination of content (where the telecoms could censor material, and discriminate against competing interests). Internet taxation also falls into the government category; a federal law restricts access, e-mail and bandwidth taxes in efforts to promote greater internet use and innovation. As for industry standards, there’s been discussion about how established media companies use web links only to connect with information that they’ve created, while bloggers link to a wide range of material produced by many others; by doing this, big media isn’t utilizing one of the internet’s most powerful tools… the wealth of information available from myriad sources.

As I was reading and trying to absorb Christensen’s theories, it was most helpful when the book cited actual instances. But moreover, I found myself often trying to apply the theories to my company’s new publishing initiative. We’re attempting to move into the consumer magazine business, and compete with what are referred to as “city magazines”. To some extent this is well outside our area of expertise, and thus will provide internal challenges. I was regularly considering how our company may or may not succeed in regard to Resources, Processes and Values, and Asymmetries; in particular, our current processes cannot transfer seamlessly, and we need to revisit our values in terms of resources. This material is proving insightful for me as we structure ourselves for entering this market.

Meanwhile, as Christensen takes a theoretical approach, Rheingold applies current mobile technology to some well-worn principles. His observations are solid, and may help me to become better at addressing the present and future in terms of theory.

Sports plays a big role in American society… and it’s big business, too. The same now holds true for fantasy sports, which have 15 million yearly participants, and a $4 billion annual economic impact. In fantasy sports leagues, fantasy owners build and manage teams of professional players, and compete against other owners based on the statistics generated upon the actual field of play.

My paper will trace the origins of fantasy sports to its emergence as the new American pastime, and what the future holds. It will document the role the internet has played in this industry’s growth, and the many business and revenue models, including league services and content providers. Relevant legal and sociological issues will also be examined.

I was initially uncertain as to the number of available sources that would be considered scholarly regarding the subject of fantasy sports. So I was pleasantly surprised to come across quite a few, ranging from the history to sociological aspects to legal issues.

Here’s one that I could see being utilized in my paper…

Davis, N.W., Duncan, M.C. (2006). Sports knowledge is power: reinforcing masculine privilege through fantasy sport league participation. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 30(3), 244-264. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from Research Library database. (Document ID: 1116915671).

Fantasy sports, with millions of participants yearly, is still predominantly played by men. This study will provide information about this gender gap, and how fantasy sports mirror spectator sports in that regard. It may also help me in assessing the potential for increased participation by women over time, and how the internet might facilitate that growth.

The first week’s readings, while differing in style, work well together and in many ways reinforce the same ideas and insights. All focus on the innovations that move us forward, and the importance of electricity in reaching increasingly larger audiences. And both Mediamorphosis and Winston agree that labeling recent advances as an “information revolution” is inaccurate when observing history; the need for disseminating information has long been a central objective, which took off exponentially in the early 1800s.

All three readings incorporate aspects of suppression. Mediamorphosis (color vs. black/white television) and The Economist (Skype vs. established telephony protocol) provide concrete examples of businesses working to protect their interests. And this is where I typically imagined suppression to be most common… business looking to defend itself. But Winston, in his pedantic prose, also contends that the market, via social necessity, also plays a role in suppression: “social constraints limit the potential of a device to disrupt pre-existing social formations.” Suppression can be as much market-driven as by industry.

I found it interesting that innovators didn’t always know the impact of their creations. Many never saw the end product of their ideas and experiments, nor imagined the degree to which their ideas would be cultivated and applied to future advances. That said, their innovations were well-documented, consulted and credited by subsequent technology leaders.

I was fascinated by an aspect of Mediamorphosis that combines my interests in media and politics. National radio networks not only changed the media landscape, but also the country’s. By focusing on larger audiences and the advertising it would attract, the national programming was created to appeal to the most obvious and lucrative market… white men. This ran counter to local programming and its concentration on more diverse constituencies which made up smaller communities. As a result, this embrace of a simplistic marketing approach exacerbated racial, cultural and religious inequities that have lasted to this day.

Some questions for potential discussion…

• I get this question often, and struggle with a definitive answer… What is digital media? Breaking it down, digital is expressing information in numbers, and media is a means of mass communication. But what should be our quick and easy definition for this question when it comes our way?

• The Economist article on Skype is dated September 2005. What has been the upshot of Skypes VOIP approach on the telecoms? Has it really changed the way we access, use and pay for voice communications? Is this model being embraced, or has it become just another mean of communication?

• Looking over the years, I’d surmise that the main uses of media have been news, entertainment and interpersonal communication. Are there other obvious subjects that I’m overlooking? Is my appraisal too broad?

I’ve set up a blog… long time coming. More comments are sure to follow. And, as those of you who know me are well aware, I’ll usually have no shortage of topics upon which to expound. More later.