Media: Disruption is the New Order

A couple of things I’ve come across have got me thinking about the media business — broadly speaking — and just how profound the changes it is undergoing really are. It’s easy to dismiss them as just some kids on MySpace or a bunch of yahoos posting their juvenilia on YouTube, but it is really much more than that. Not a magical transformation by any means, but more like a rapid evolution, and a turbulent one at that.

One of the pieces that got me thinking was a story in the Los Angeles Times by author Neal Gabler called The Movie Magic is Gone. Gabler describes — in a piece not-so-coincidentally published at Oscar time — how the traditional movie industry is in decline, in part because:

“To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content.”

The reality is that the Internet is unbundling the movie industry in the same way it is unbundling the newspaper industry and the music industry — dismantling or disrupting the traditional power relationships, in part by separating content from distribution. As Gabler puts it: “Much of modern media is dedicated to empowering audiences that no longer want to be passive.” And even when they do want to be passive, traditional content sources are finding a whole lot more competition for those eyeballs.

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