If there is one unshakeable law of the media, it is that it gets more and more complex; it never simplifies.
Admittedly, my memory doesn’t go back to the days of painting on cave walls, so I’m not prepared to say that the cave painters were the media of their time, but the phenomenon of ‘adult illustrations’ goes back at least that far and the personal computer didn’t create the porn business, despite what some politicians seem to think.
What I can remember, however, is the early days of TV when it was pretty much taken for granted that that was the end of radio and probably newspapers. And as for books… forget them.
So today, we look at electronic books and, once again, there are anxious people in the publishing industry shaking their heads, saying that paper books are doomed. And of course, magazines will die when e-magazines take over.
Print survives
But old media doesn’t die. Change, yes: today’s newspaper is certainly very different to the monsters published before the Second World War. But the shift from hot-metal typesetting, where a newspaper was a publisher who owned a print works, to today’s papers where you can pick up a copy of the Financial Times in Taipei before Dubliners can wake up and read it, is nothing compared to what is on the way.
In this area, the personal computer really is changing things, in ways that we still don’t begin to guess, but that we are starting to see.
For the last six months, I’ve been a user of Google mail. I also use the Google toolbar on my browser. The results of Google analysing my e-mail and browsing habits are, frankly, as astonishing as I suspected they would be. For example, about 10 per cent of the advertisements I now see from Google are for press releases in personal computing and wireless. As I wrote a couple of months back, the retailer is regaining control of what consumers buy over the Internet and the traditional mass-market media is fading.
However, that doesn’t mean that printed newspapers are about to vanish. Quite the opposite; I think they are just about to change in ways that are impossible to predict because there will be so many versions.
If we assume that Google continues to be seen as a great way of discovering neat new stuff, rather than as a threat to privacy (either could be true, of course) and that its influence and technology expands the way it has been developing, then we can predict that an advertiser will be able to describe you, accurately, and send you an advertisement that exactly anticipates your needs.
Most people seem to be anticipating, somehow, that this advertising will be done on your PC display or your mobile phone. I think it will, but I also think there are limits to the situations in which you will want to use high-tech, where paper will be valuable.
Personalised media
My vision of a typical day, in a decade, suggests that at the point where I touch in with my commuter card, a copy of Guy Kewney Daily will be printed and waiting for me. The front-page article will probably be picked from my known obsessions but, equally, it could include two or three urgent e-mails from people I’m known to be frantic to hear from; plus some messages from people in my family. And there will be unpublished press announcements that match the articles I’m currently researching, reviews of classical concerts and sci-fi books and a few local scandals about council spending where I live. Plus, of course, adverts for the book stall I’ll walk past when I get off the train or the pizza place I’ll pass at lunch…
When I first had this vision, I imagined huge, ultra-fast printing presses doing the ink-work. That may yet happen – there are developments that mean it’s cheaper to produce a one-off newspaper than to produce 100 and throw 40 of them away unsold. But those developments aren’t necessary. All that’s needed is a way of franchising existing printer owners – basically, you and me.
The delivery of the paper – once marked with ink – isn’t going to be the challenge. The challenge will be to make sure that it only gets printed at the point in your daily journey where you will want it, so it isn’t thrown away.
That’s where the PC, phone and Internet will triumph because, essentially, human beings are predictable animals. I may not know the exact year of your life you set up home with a partner, but I’d be a fool to bet that you won’t. Most people do. And when they do, they usually require a mortgage. I may not be able to predict at the time of your birth the day you will apply for that mortgage, but pattern recognition will spot the changes before they happen, in plenty of time.
Nobody will sit in a control room and say: Oh look, they’ve browsed three real-estate agent sites in Naas, but the system will know. It will be done by mindless pattern matching. And, I suspect, it will be spookily accurate.
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