NEW MEDIA, NEW PROBLEMS

Based on a podcast from a Researcher to Researcher event, held in the Wolfson Research Exchange

There have been vast changes in the way we consume and create media over the past few years, but what effect has this had on creative practices? What does the future hold for the creation and publication of online content? This podcast, the final in our series of Researcher to Researcher events, features three Warwick academics; Professor Gregory Crawford, Department of Economics; Dr Chris Bilton, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies; and Dr Eric Jensen, Department of Sociology.

Few would argue that the media landscape has changed beyond recognition, thanks to recent developments in the digital world. Devices such as iPhones, Blackberries and iPads, in tandem with online tools like Twitter and Google, have not only influenced the way that we interact with each other socially, they have democratised newsgathering and changed the economic model for media markets forever.

Whereas journalists, via media corporations, have traditionally transmitted information (such as product reviews) to a passive public, now individuals have an ‘amplified’ voice, and can to a certain extent influence the market. An important power shift has taken place, but what effect has it had on creative practices? Is content still king or have we become too reliant on replicating and repackaging material? And what would happen to the creative industries if copyright, too, was swept away by the Internet?

Is content still king or have we become too reliant on replicating and repackaging material?

These are some of the questions raised by three Warwick academics - Professor Gregory Crawford (Economics Department), Dr Chris Bilton (Director for the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies) and Dr Eric Jensen (Department of Sociology) - in this Researcher to Researcher event at the Wolfson Research Exchange.

Professor Crawford provides the framework of the debate with a look at how media markets work. Most markets work on a supply and demand basis, he explains, but media markets are a little bit different. Media firms make money from charging people for content, but when they do that, they create an audience. They can then sell access to that audience, also making money from firms that want to advertise their products. ‘This dual source of revenue is influential for understanding media markets because the changes that we’re going to talk about can influence the two sides differently,’ says the Professor.

The other thing that’s different for media markets is that they have ‘high first-copy costs and low next-copy costs’, i.e. if you’re making a film, it costs a lot of money to make the original print of the film, but once you show it to someone, it’s just as cheap to show it millions of people. But, as Professor Crawford explains, the Internet has changed the media landscape dramatically – many of us are consuming more media as a result of gadgets such as smart phones and the cost of distributing products has lowered considerably. Another key change has been the ability to prevent re-sale. Whereas in the past the release of a film, for example, would be sequenced in time – from the cinema to an airline to a paid TV channel – piracy has made it harder to cover the first-copy cost. ‘So what we’re seeing is consolidation across platforms and consolidation across countries,’ concludes the Professor.

Dr Bilton follows on with some observations on the implications of these changes for culture and creativity, starting with two brief “stories”: the Death of the Author and the Death of the Publisher. These popular clichés about new media are not necessarily true, he says; we have seen the destruction of power structures for good, it’s just that the old structures have collapsed and new power structures have taken their place. ‘We’ve moved past control by big record labels to control by iTunes; we’ve moved from control by big broadcasting monopolies to control by Google; we’ve moved from people reading newspapers to people tweeting or blogging or podcasting,’ he says.

One of the concerns, he continues, is the effects that this ‘reintermediation’ has had on creativity and content. ‘A lower-risk strategy for the creative industries, instead of generating and producing content, is to just move that content around – repackage it, re-bundle it, put it in a different service,’ explains Dr Bilton. ‘What this leads to is imagining a future, if you’re a business person, in which you get rid of that uncertainty of the creative media industries and you move from the zone of risk into the zone of exploitation... We’ve moved away from “content is king” to “context is king” – we’ve moved towards industries which are increasingly not so much about selling you content but... selling you the experiences around that content.’

Dr Bilton speculates that instead of the Death of the Author or the Death of the Publisher, we may in fact be seeing the Death of Content. ‘How do you make money from content?’ he asks. One way is to give it away and to use that gift to sell something else. ‘Piracy and the availability of free content has led to a generation of consumers who don’t really expect to pay for content – they assume that it’s free... there’s a logic and a morality to this in the mind of the consumer,’ he adds, ‘because... if you make a copy of a movie it doesn’t devalue the movie, arguably it makes it more valuable by sharing.’

There is great potential around the web as a kind of new printing press...

Finally, Dr Jensen, who teaches media sociology, concludes the session with a look at the democratic potential of new media and some of its limitations. ‘There is great potential around the web as a kind of new printing press, which has inaugurated a new era of a broader range of content producers,’ he says. ‘This has been exuberantly described as the Fifth Estate,’ he explains, ‘[the Fourth Estate] - the press - was supposed to hold the government and the State and powerful interest to account and now there’s a Fifth Estate that can even hold the powerful media interest to account as well.’

Certain ‘e-optimists’ saw a lot of potential around the democratisation of the public sphere through the web, but, says Dr Jensen, his view is somewhat more pessimistic, as there are a number of limitations from the perspective of political economy, and also the digital divide. ‘Offline media dominate the online sphere,’ he says, ‘...companies like CNN, CBS and the BBC. This means that, largely, you just get recycled content... Even though you get this idea that new media is dominant, it’s still essentially old media online. Even peer-to-peer communication [channels], like Twitter, are dominated by the conventional media personalities, so it’s not an equal playing field.’

You can now listen to the full podcast below.

Professor Gregory Crawford is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). He is an empirical economist specialising in the fields of industrial organisation, econometrics, and media economics.

Dr Chris Bilton is the director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies and has been a lecturer there since 1997. He worked in the cultural sector for ten years before coming to Warwick, touring Britain and Europe as a writer, performer and manager with Balloonatics Theatre Company and working as Arts Development Officer for City of Westminster Arts Council in London.

Dr Eric Jensen teaches in sociology at the University of Warwick. He has two main research specialisms: public engagement with science and science in the media. His research on the latter has included a detailed investigation of coverage of the issue of therapeutic cloning in the US and UK. He has a forthcoming book on this topic, under contract with Ashgate.