Futuretech
Preparing students for a world in which all media are becoming one
Originally published in the Dow Jones News Fund's Adviser Update, Winter 2010
by Gary Clites
Media observers were largely confused in early December when Apple announced it’s acquisition of music streaming company Lala. For years, Apple’s iTunes Store has held a virtual corner on the music downloading market, and Lala, which operates a subscription music streaming service, was, by its own admission, on the verge of unprofitability. Why, then, would Apple pay a rumored $80 million for the troubled company?
The answer may reflect an important shift in the way content will be distributed to consumers in the future. As the people charged with preparing the students who will create that content, it is important journalism educators be aware of these potential developments.
We’ve all heard too much talk about the death of print. Some school districts have begun cutting print journalism programs in the mistaken belief that print is a dying industry. While newspaper readership is down, it’s only down a little. It is, rather, the lack of advertising revenue in a severely constricted economy that has hurt the newspaper and magazine industries. Still, there is no question that all media is moving toward the digital. Washingtonpost.com receives nearly ten times the readers online that its print cousin ever drew, and the good thing is that journalism makes up much of the content we enjoy online every day.
Much has been written about the concept of Web 2.0 and the role of convergence in new journalism (including in this column), but the Lala acquisition may indicate a far deeper change in the way media is delivered. Cellular companies are currently at work blanketing the planet with wireless internet access. We’ve all heard of 3G technology, but communications companies are currently at work developing 4G and 5G systems, with an eye to delivering high speed access virtually everywhere. At the same time, other companies are converting traditional phone and cable delivery lines to fiber optic cable, promising a world in the near future in which high speed internet access is available virtually everywhere.
So far, this communications world has led to a plethora of personal products we use to access the digital universe. One might have a cell phone (perhaps with Internet access) to make calls and text; an iPod to store and access music; a laptop to create, access the Internet and store documents and programs; a Kindle to read books and magazines; a satellite radio receiver in your car; a game system; a digital television for entertainment; and a DVR to store video content. In other words, Web 1.0 and 2.0 have flooded our world with screens and storage units.
Long term, Web 3.0 and 4.0 will likely take us in the opposite direction. The Apple–Lala merger probably indicates the latter’s belief that downloading music to a dedicated music device may have a limited lifespan. Apple may be positioning itself for a world in which your music library is stored at iTunes and is accessible wherever you are. Also in December, Comcast began streaming its cable television service to viewers over the Internet. Netflix and Blockbuster are daily increasing the number of movies and television shows they sell as streaming media via the Internet allowing customers to feed them to their flat screens using a laptop or XBox. At the same time, material traditionally stored locally is moving online, as we store our documents at GoogleDocs and plan our projects on Wiki sites.
These recent developments are indicators of a future world in which all content will likely stream to the consumer over the Internet. Not that content will be free. Rather, your personal accounts for software, music, video, radio, etc. will hold your content out on the ‘net. This concept has generally been called the "cloud," the idea that content will exist out on the 'net and then rain down to devices that have access to it. The term, however, has gotten confusing in that some computer and software companies have tried to apply it specifically to their products. Still, the idea of the quickly developing cloud seems to be the direction in which we're headed.
And, just as the devices we use are beginning to cross content platforms today (laptops with television, cell phones with the Internet and video), over the coming decades we will likely see most of the devices mentioned above collapse into fewer items. If your documents, entertainment and informational content are all accessible via the web from any location, they can also all be accessed using one device. Whether that device is a laptop, a PDA, or something yet completely unconceived of (bet it has the letter “I” in the name), once content and software are primarily web-based, it really need only function as a key to securely access content and as a conduit to serve it to televisions and other screens. It may be something everyone carries a copy of, or something so ubiquitous that there is one in every room and vehicle in the world.
My students have nicknamed this theoretical device “the Cube,” and have tried to imagine what form it will take. Whether they get it right or not, they are thinking ahead to a world in which journalists create media, and consumers walk around with a device that allows them to access it in whatever form they choose... A world in which the line between the New York Times, an ABC station in Tampa and, unfortunately, the National Enquirer is blurred because they all flow to the user through the same source.
If Marshall McLuhan was right, and the medium is the message, our students need to be prepared for a world in which all messages flow to them through one uniform medium. If we do our jobs right, they’ll be the ones running it.
© Gary Clites, 2010