Category Archives: Media ecology

TCP/IP and the dim future of universities

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This week’s Observer column.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in 1995 to be precise, a scholar named Eli Noam published an article in the prestigious journal Science under the title “Electronics and the Dim Future of the University”. In it, Professor Noam argued that the basic model of a university – which had been stable for hundreds of years – would be threatened by networked communications technologies.

Under the classical model, universities were institutions that created, stored and disseminated knowledge. If students or scholars wished to access that knowledge, they had to come to the university. But, Noam argued, the internet would threaten that model by raising the question memorably posed by Howard Rheingold in the 1980s: “Where is the Library of Congress when it’s on my desktop?” If all the world’s stored knowledge can be accessed from any networked device, and if the teaching materials and lectures of the best scholars are likewise available online, why should students pay fees and incur debts to live in cramped accommodation for three years? What would be the USP of the traditional university when its monopolies on storage and dissemination eroded?

If that was a good question in 1995, it’s an even better one today…

Democratising web streaming

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Very interesting development. At the moment, webcasting is great but requires significant resources (server and bandwidth) to do it on any scale. This could put it within the reach of just about everybody. It’s not ready yet, but should be out by the Summer.

It’s Groundhog Day on the “sources going direct” question

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Acute blog post by George Brock.

Rupert Murdoch rarely says or does anything which doesn’t cause dismay somewhere. So it has been with his appearance on Twitter.

The octogenarian’s pithy provocations, unmediated by spin-doctors, have been enough to start yet more worries about the future of journalism. People were apparently in all seriousness sitting around at a seminar in the Columbia Journalism School considering the question of “sources” who “go direct” (to the audience, that is). The language itself is unintentionally revealing: how dare these people cut out the middleman and communicate directly with people? The seminar anxiously wondered if this would be “good for journalism”.

That will depend on how well journalists adapt to a transformative change.

Yep. George’s Inaugural Lecture laid out the argument nicely.

Guess Who?

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Amazing the gems one finds on YouTube. Thanks to Brian for this one. The intro is baffling, but the rest of it is a hoot (or an hoot, as Alan Bennett might say).

Blackout

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It’s strange how shocking this is. It’s a reminder of how dependent we have become on our networked environment. As a sardonic colleague put it this morning, some of his students are going to be mightily discombobulated today when they realise that (a) an essay is due and (b) Wikipedia isn’t available. But that’s too cynical. He and I use Wikipedia every day, and it often saves us a lot of footnoting and explanation.

The blackout served a useful purpose — that of drawing attention to the SOPA and PIPA Bills now before the US Congress. I wrote about these on January 8. Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, has posted a really good essay explaining why he — and the Lab — oppose the Bills.

Is YouTube really a threat to conventional TV?

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From my piece in yesterday’s Observer.

The big question is whether YouTube poses a strategic threat to the traditional television industry. Up to now, most observers have been sceptical about that. They see conventional TV and YouTube as inhabitants of parallel universes. TV is all about marshalling scarce and expensive resources, exerting tight editorial control and charging for content. YouTube is all about the absence of editorial control, not charging for content, harnessing the abundance of free, user-generated (and sometimes copyrighted) material and extracting value from it by attaching personalised advertising to video clips.

The parallel-universes theory appears to be supported by comparisons of how people use YouTube and conventional TV. While a lot of people visit YouTube every day, they stay, on average, for only 15 minutes. Conventional television viewing, on the other hand, at between four and five hours a day in the US, seems to be holding up quite well. On the basis of these numbers, can TV executives continue to sleep easily?

Maybe. But Google, which owns YouTube, has plans to increase the “stickiness” of YouTube by getting into the content-creation business…

The ideas man

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I’ve long been an addict of Edge.org, the website/salon founded by John Brockman. I finally got to interview him for the Observer.

To say that John Brockman is a literary agent is like saying that David Hockney is a photographer. For while it’s true that Hockney has indeed made astonishingly creative use of photography, and Brockman is indeed a successful literary agent who represents an enviable stable of high-profile scientists and communicators, in both cases the description rather understates the reality. More accurate ways of describing Brockman would be to say that he is a “cultural impresario” or, as his friend Stewart Brand puts it, an “intellectual enzyme”. Brand goes on helpfully to explain that an enzyme is “a biological catalyst – an adroit enabler of otherwise impossible things”.

The first thing you notice about Brockman, though, is the interesting way he bridges CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” – the parallel universes of the arts and the sciences. When profilers ask him for pictures, one he often sends shows him with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, no less. Or shots of the billboard photographs of his head that were used to publicise an eminently forgettable 1968 movie. But he’s also one of the few people around who can phone Nobel laureates in science with a good chance that they will take the call.