Seamus McCauley on The Audience As Enemy
Over at Virtual Economics, Seamus McCauley follows the lead of Jeff Jarvis, and takes a bludgeon to the head of Paul Hayes, Managing Director of Times Publications, because of his antediluvian natterings about bloggers. He suggested that bloggers and their readers are unsavory geeks you wouldn't want to invite home for dinner, among other slurs.
[Seamus McCauley]I do not know of anything more certainly injurious to the long-term prospects of mainstream media than this sort of unabashed, unquestioning contempt for the people formerly known as the audience (PressThink) - the people who buy newspapers and who presumably right up until they started blogging fell into the category of valued paying customers. Now they've spoken back they are "in need of therapy", people "you'd prefer not to meet" or "geeks" (an insult still in currency only amongst those so from the cluetrain they don't realise that geeks proudly label themselves geeks and have done since even before Microserfs made us aware of the fact a decade ago).
Newspaper readers are people. Bloggers are people. Often, astonishing though this apparently seems to many who should know better, they are the same people. If you're going to hold your paying customers in contempt at least don't stand up in a public forum and crack jokes about it. As I've said before and will surely say again...when your audience is your enemy, the game is already over. Last year losses at Times Newspapers Ltd widened from £40 million to £46.9 million - more, perhaps, because the connection between the company and its (potential? ex?) customers has manifestly been severed at the highest level than because of the "increased depreciation and other costs associated with the development of new printing plants" that the company claimed.
Fear breeds contempt. The mainstream media moguls are terrified, and the "how dare they" attitude is going to remain prevalent until these sort of idiots are fired, retire, or die.
For the newspapers, there is probably too little runway and not enough freedom of movement to avoid the ultimate crash, although some form of the London Times and New York Time will persist, even after the print legacy is completely gone.
But dinosaurs like Paul Hayes are deluding themselves and harming their investors with this sort of idiocy. The sheep are now wolves, and will never return to the fold. There is no soft landing. Social media is not a fad, it is a rejection of media control by the big corporations. While many of the folks who turn their back on the daily tabloid can't articulate the underlying reasons that other options (namely, blogs and other social media sources online) are more attractive to them, that doesn't mean that they are unintelligent faddists. They are dissaffected because of the paternalistic and self-congratulatory attitude that imbues journals like the London Times and its management philosophy.
Hayes and his ilk are unwilling to accept the notion that individuals are smart enought to know what's important to them. Mass market media believes the individual is defined in terms of membership in an audience, an audience whose characteristics, wants and needs are defined by the media. And individuals have become canny enough to know that organizations like the London Times may not always have our best interests at heart, no matter how much they spew the dogma of impartial journalism, or wrap themselves in national or philosophical banners.
The individual is the new group, the new audience of one: we are in a time when affiliation to group norms and limitations is secondary to our personal wants and needs. We don't have to put up with what they are splashing on the front page or the evening news. We can craft our own slice through the affairs of the day, our own perspective, our own causes.
The future media giants -- who may be the major web players, like Google, Yahoo, etc., but are just as likely to be players that haven't arisen yet -- will be those who get this; who, instead of following Hayes' approach of resisting this seismic shift in media by calling its adherents and participants fools, lunatics, and unsavory geeks that you wouldn't have over to dinner, will instead move onto a new footing, a new dynamic, where the individual self-mediates and the media companies serve as our tools, not our overlords.
[Pointer from Umair Haque]
Great Post. However, why do people like Jeff Jarvis linkin and point the community into these closed loop paradigms ??
Posted by: /pd | May 30, 2006 at 01:32 PM