New Media as a Meteor

As an 8-year-old, I was enthralled with the novels of Michael Crichton. I had seen "Jurassic Park" in the theater more times than I'd care to admit, and had gone on to read most of his novels, essays, and speeches. At the time, Crichton was making news about a speech he had recently written about what he called the "mediasaurus."

Please read the speech in its entirety here.

I bring up a 15-year-old speech about the media because, in it, Crichton makes some startling predictions about what the mass media would become. He predicts the downfall of newspapers, the rise of customizable news subscriptions (essentially RSS feeds), and the dominance of the Internet in bringing people news.

Some of Crichton's predictions panned out, some didn't. More important than his ability to accurately predict the future of mass media are some of the issues Crichton raises in his speech, all of which are important today. These are the underlying issues of what we discussed in Comms 239 today- that the news industry is suffering from what other industries would see as dissatisfied consumers. The press chalks it up to unpredictable changes in the media that make earning a living the old-fashioned way increasingly difficult. Crichton poses the hypothesis that consumers are seeking alternative media because Media 1.0 are failing to deliver a quality product. Readers are finding their news online because it is more likely to present a more accurate picture, or, at least, one that caters more to their wants. Readers are finding that, contrary to what their parents believed, newspapers may not be the most accurate, insightful, or interesting way to present the news. They have become obsolete.

To think of news as a service, one whose monopoly is being broken, is an insightful way to look at it. I think that, for a long time, the press viewed themselves as the only producer of the news, the only option for learning about current events. After years of assuming that there is a need for a middle-man, the media are finding themselves going the way of the cobbler and the candle maker. Why not get the news directly and disseminate it yourself? Why accept a watered-down, simplistic version of the truth?

Essentially, this question has yet to be raised. Consumers still expect their world to be organized and presorted before it's shown to them. With the current information revolution, however, this is an issue that will come to the surface, if only in the subtext. In a way, it already is. Consumers want a variety of news sources, available for free, so that the real story can be discerned from between the lines. Hopefully that is an eventuality that we will reach- a free flow of information that does not oversimplify or understate issues that shape our world.