journal review 21: Rebuilding the Media

by Nurerlin Zulkhairy

The radical changes the newspaper industry needs to implement arise from a more true understanding by that industry of why newspaper readership began declining well before the Internet was opened to the public; about why one billion people worldwide have gone onto the Internet after it was opened to the public which they didn't do it to read traditional media on computer screens, and about why all that plus the misnamed and illusionary 'fracturing' of media audiences requires semantics solutions.

A newspaper isn't a medium, nor are newspapers media. Magazines aren't media nor is a magazine a medium. Television isn't a medium nor is radio nor are radio or television stations media. A website isn't a medium nor is the Internet media (Vin Crosbie).

Misunderstanding New Media

Companies that broadcast programs or that publish newspapers or magazines are having problems understanding and adapting to why and how one billion consumers are now using Internet-based technologies to receive news, information, and entertainment. Those companies have the problems simply because they misunderstand the meaning of media or medium. It is that starkly simple. Their misunderstanding of the terms and not the new technologies that a consumer use which is the root of the companies' problems. Most of the executives work in the 'Mass Media' (the Mass Medium). But almost all will take that a step further which is a misstep and say that their broadcast, newspaper, or magazine is a medium.

Broadcast and publishing executives mistake Mass Media as a catchall phrase for all possible media, as if no other medium can exist except as a Mass Medium. Moreover, they extend this mistaken meaning of medium to cover their own broadcasts or publications.

So entrenched has the contemporary misunderstanding of the terms media and medium become that the mistake limits the abilities of most publishing or broadcasting executives to comprehend what exactly is a medium or the media in which they work.

What is medium?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the colloquial meaning of medium is a latecomer to the publishing industry. It dates only from around 1880 — a quarter millennium after publication of the first daily newspapers and 150 years after publication of the first magazines:

Medium ('mi:diem), sb. and a. Pl. Mediia, -iums. [a. L. Medium, neuter of medius middle, cogn. With MID a.] A. sb 5. a. An intermediate agency, means, instrument or channel. Also, intermediation, instrumentality: in phrase by or through the medium of. spec. of newspapers, radio, television , etc. As vehicles of mass communication . Also attrib. And in pl. (see MEDIA) 1880 Coach Builders' Art Jrnl. I. 63: 'Considering your Journal one of the best possible mediums for such a scheme.'

What is media?

Media ('mi:dia), sb. pl. [Pl. F MEDIUM sb., prob. After mass media.] Newspapers, radio, television, etc., collectively, as vehicles of mass communication. Freq. attrib. or as adj. Also erron. As sing. in same sense. 1923 [see mass medium].

What is medium?

Mass medium (,maes 'mi:diem). [f. MASS sb. + MEDIUM sb.] A medium of communications (such as radio, television, newspapers, etc.) that reaches a large number of people.

In 1923 S. M. FECHHEIMER in N. T. Praigg Advertising & Selling v. 238 (title) Class appeal in mass media. Ibid. The several million readers of a big mass medium. G. SNOW in Ibid. 240 'Mass media represents the most economical way of getting the story over the new and wider market in the least time.'

Just as only three transportation media exist, only three communications media exist:

As with transportation media, two of these communication media are ancient and people's usage of the two arose independent of technology. However, the third medium is relatively new and is entirely dependent upon technology, it is called the Interpersonal Media.

The New Media

New Medium for communications. It is a new communication medium that, like Sky for prior transportation media, bridges the mutually incompatible characteristics of prior communications media.

Among the technologies needed to create this New Medium were the invention of digital communications during the late 1940s, invention of the Transport Control/Internet Protocol ((TCP/IP) during the late 1960s, ARPANET's creation of the Internet and other people's invention of the personal computer during in the 1970s, and to lesser extents the invention of the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) in the late 1980s, opening of the Internet to the public in 1992, and invention of the graphical browser software later that year. Those and other technological innovations converged to create a new communications medium that has characteristics inconceivable even a decade ago.

A website can be a vehicle to display Mass Medium content, which indeed is how most newspapers, magazines, and broadcasts use it. However, that merely replicates online the hallmark limitations of Mass Medium vehicles and doesn't take advantage of the New Medium's ability to display a precise match of specific information to each and every recipient's individual needs and interests, however different those recipients may be.

Moreover, because each recipient in the New Medium shares with all publishers and broadcasters equal and reciprocal control over what that recipient gets, neither by each recipient's choices of which publishers' or broadcasters' websites to visit or else increasingly by mechanisms that allow the recipient to aggregate that content without visiting each of those publishers' or broadcasters' sites and these New Medium consumers are leaving behind the traditional Mass Medium's packaging of information.

Interactivity, as long ago defined by Dr. Jonathan Steuer in the Journal of Communications is "the extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real time." That is a far cry from simply letting the user read Mass Medium newspaper, magazines, or broadcast content that has been shoveled online.

Within the next ten years, most New Medium consumers will be receiving information from each's choice of myriad broadcasters and publishers, perhaps too many for any individual consumer to name or even realize. (Early adopters of tag-driven XML, advanced RSS, and 'peer-to-peer' technologies have already begun making such use). Because these many consumers will be sharing content choices and control with all publisher and broadcasters, the New Medium serves not just a 'one-to-one' or 'one-to-many' medium but a 'many-to-many' one. Publisher and broadcasters who don't make full use of the New Medium will likely be left behind and wither during this new century.