The change in the architecture of the media is completely connected to a change of the control
With the broadcast system you have one person in one station
deciding what gets put out over the airwaves.
When you have distributed network like the internet everybody can be a server.
There's no distinction between the broadcaster and the receiver:
every computer does both.
You can take your home laptop and run a server off of it that can distribute movies and music
and webpages and email in the same way that the biggest computers at google can.
there's no fundamental difference between the computers they have in iraq in their server rooms
and what you have on your desk
In the old system of broadcasting,
you were fundamentally limited by the amount of space in the airwaves
you could only send out 10 channels over the airwaves in television
or even with cable you had 500 channels.
On the internet, everybody can have a channel;
everyone can get a blog or a MySpace page;
everyone has a way of expressing themselves
and so what you see now is not a question of
who gets access to the airwaves,
it's a question of who gets control
over the ways you find people.
You start seeing power centralising in sites like google,
these sort of 'gatekeepers' that tell you where on the internet you want to go
the people who provide you your sources of news and information.
so its not only certain people have a license to speak
now everyone has a license to speak,
it's question of who gets heard.
So one of the biggest questions we're facing in a world of many speakers
how do you find what's good?
Are we gonna go to a system like the old media where you go to CNN
and they pick a handful of people to focus on
and you read what they say
or are we going to go with something more like the internet
where everybody has a chance of being heard, a more democratic system.
One of the most interesting technologies for doing something like that
is a system called collaborative filtering,
where everybody expresses their opinions on what they like and what they don't like
and the computer tries to match you up with other people who have similar preferences
and recommend you things that they also like that you didn't know about before.
It's the same kind of system you see on Amazon
where people who bought this book also bought this book
people are trying to experiment that not only with books
but with blogs, web pages and news stories all across the internet,
they're trying to find ways and things that you've never heard of before
and bringing them in front of you
Mass media had this fundamental paradox
because it was aiming at a huge audience
but it wanted to convince everybody they were an individual
you see all these ads on television all the time like
'buck the trend, buy these jeans' right!?
and it's on a show that 4 million people are watching,
you're not going to buck a trend by doing what 4 million other people are.
Now that the internet is actually making these nitch things possible
the mass media is incredibly threatened
no longer this idea of bucking the crowd and being your own
it's no longer just a theory you can actually do it on the internet
And what we're starting to see is tools that take power away from the big conglomerates
and start to distribute it to small groups.
And so there are a bunch of issues in a system like that there are questions of funding you know,
how will these small groups get paid and how will the random blogger be able to live
in a way that an investigative journalist can now
because there's one giant source of advertising
you know there are question finding people, how will I be able to find the stuff I'm interested,
and the stuff that's trustworthy and reliable
and so for each of these there are new technologies
people are trying all kinds of different things
and all of these say different things about the internet
there is still experimentation in this, since everybody can just go up and start a website
with a new piece of technology that try and solve one of these problems
We're seeing lots of different possibilities, lots of different funding models
lots of different recommendations systems and who knows what will work best
we have a chance to try it all and see what falls out
So there are a couple of interesting funding models:
One of course is this standard model of advertising,
you go to a bunch of big corporate sponsors and instead of having them fund a television show
you have them fund your webpage
but a more interesting one is you do the same thing with nitch groups
instead of going to IBM/Ford or a big company, and having them buy a banner on your website
you go to people that actually care about the readers you have
if you're a design weblog you go to design companies
if you're a political blog, you go to other politicians
you have a very targeted narrow group of people who are really interested in the subject,
thats an audience advertisers really love
another possibility is to turn directly to your readers for support
you see blogs say, I wanna go to a trip to New Hampshire
to cover the american political conventions
will you support me?
and the readers pour in money
these people are very dedicated they feel like they have a personal connection
with the person writing
they are eager to spend money to support it!
Another thing is that you simply work of volunteer labor
you have people that have a day job thats an expert in a subject
and they just enjoy talking about it so they rate stuff in their free time
and publish it on the internet
or they have readers who read their site and contribute stuff
and it gets compiled into one exciting source.
So I think there are lots of interesting experiments,
people are trying lots of different ways
One of the errors you had with television, right, could only provide one level of interest
it was funded based on adertising not on how much people cared about the programme
advertisers were going to pay the same no matter how exciting or how compelling
or how interested an audience was in a show
so what you ended up with was fairly boring shows that appealed to lots of people
because that's what advertisers wanted
they wanted lots people watching the shows
whereas in a normal market economy what happens is
if you really want something you pay more for it
you just can't do that with television.
So one of the interesting things about broadcast is that a lot of what you like
depends on what other people like
there are only so many shows out there
they are all kind of bland
so what happens, you have these megahits
like American Idol or lost, where everybody at the water cooler is talking about this show,
so you have to watch it because otherwise you can't keep up with them
whatever social factors get involved
you have this sort of process of rich gets richer
one thing takes off because thats what everybody else is doing!
One nice thing about the internet is that it allows for so much more variety
that nitch products can get so much more attention and interest
So they've the run the numbers and this this proven mathematical fact
that as long as some percentage of what you care about is whether other people
like it or now you're gonna end up with this patterns of hits and failures
if you have two things which are equivalent in quality,
one of them is liked by one more person than the other one,
you're going to go that one
there's some small chance that you're going to go to that one
and everybody's going to start going to that one
and all of a sudden you have harry potter
this one book plucked of nowhere that suddenly becomes this massive mega-hit.
not because it's a hundred million times better written than every other book
but simply because everybody's reading it
and putting stuff on the internet doesn't change that,
you still care about what your friends like, still wanna read what everybody else is talking about,
ou still wanna do what's popular because you think maybe other people have a valid opinion
and maybe you wanna talk to them about it maybe you want to join part of this community
but whatever your reason is, as long as you care about what other people opinion
you're going to end up with these hits.
You just have this social signifier that everybody cares about
everybody's watching American Idol doesn't matter how good the show is
I mean it has to be somewhat decent so people watch it, but once everybody's watching it,
talking about it, you know, it suddenly becomes this megahit for no real reason,
right, just because it's a social phenomenon
and what television does, it chops off the tale and it throws away all the other shows
people would like but don't care enough about to be megahits
and instead pours all of its money into these cheap produced shows
well you can't get rid of hits, right
it's a fact that people would wanna do what their friends are doing
you can't avoid that but what you can do is say there's the whole rest of the world out there
there's a whole rest of what people care about other than what everybody else is doing
Everybody has their own particular interests everybody has something that fascinates them
and what the internet does is it allows them to 'do' that
to get involved and find other people who share these things
one of the exciting things about Wickipedia is that it doesn't just have articles on
you know, 100 most popular things or 1000 most popular things
you can pick the most obscure subject in the world and there's an article about it
Because for EVERYTHING, there's someone who cares a great deal about it
and that's what television, that's what radio doesn't provide, but the internet does!
it provides a way for you to get in touch with those other people who really
care about this completely obscure thing
It doesn't just go into the direction of topic, it goes into the direction of time
You can go back in time and find all the shows that have been canceled
find all the articles that have been deleted
you can go back and find everything that has been lost in major culture
and it's got a place on the internet
Youtube music videos from the 70s and the 80s that you can't find anywhere these days
you can watch at your leisure
I think lessening the power of the hits
bringing down the things from the top and making it more egalitarian
is the something we should always strive for
it may be really difficult it may not be super possible
but it's something to hope for, to drive for
and what that means is
throwing away as much as possible all the things that give you hints about
you should do this because other people like it
it's very tempting when you're building a website or programming system
is to start sorting things that are really popular at the top
but all that does is, that it makes it less democratic and less fair
you have to have continual pressure, to try and pull things from the bottom from the tale up
give everybody a chance to look at everything and if you do that
maybe, you won't get completely rid of hits,
but you can start to ???? some of their problems
I mean that's one power of data mining is that construct to find obscure subjects
that you wouldn't have found simply because they are not popular
you know one of the tools of recommendation
can be to pull you to the less popular stuff on the tale
The random article button on Wikipedia is really cool in this sense
you can just wake up every day and read about some completely random topic
that you never heard of except for the fact that there's an article on the Wikipedia about it
and boy are there some completely random topics on Wikipepdia