Future Exploration Network | Blog

I have been a long-time fan of Marshall McLuhan. Some of his well-known insights and aphorisms are immensely powerful. It is profoundly true that media are extensions of man; they extend our senses to take us to distant places and perspectives. McLuhan’s best known tenet, the medium is the message, is something that we all implicity understand in our media-rich world, though we rarely express it. When I first read The Medium is the Massage, which came out in 1967, it looked to me almost exactly like the bold typographical style and layout that Wired magazine was thought to have pioneered in the late 1990s. McLuhan had been there three decades earlier, and he was acknowledged as the “patron saint” of the magazine.. His influence has been profound, but now 26 years after his death, his thinking is embedded into the way we think rather than being broadly acknowledged.

While I’m not a big reader of biographies, I have just finished reading Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger , by Philip Marchand, who did an outstanding job at capturing the life and whimsy of the man. One theme that comes across very strongly through the book is how incoherent most of McLuhan’s speaking and writing was. This is not a surprise to those that have tried to get their heads around even some of McLuhan’s more mainstream work such as Understanding Media, however this seems to have been pervasive through almost all his work. The thing was McLuhan had no interest in being coherent or consistent – his approach was to spin off a million ideas and see which ones landed. Many of those that worked with him recognized both his genius, and that he was virtually crazy.

One episode that illustrates McLuhan’s extraordinary prescience is that in 1955, well before he became famous, he set up a company called Idea Consultants. One of their slogans was “A headache is a million-dollar idea trying to get born. Idea Consultants are obstetricians for these ideas.” The company never sold any ideas or got any work. However one of McLuhan’s often brillliant ideas at the time was to create a TV program that would select a business problem, build it into an interesting format, then offer a reward for the viewer who came up with the best approach. McLuhan thought that this would be far more likely to result in a good solution than hiring any group of consultants, however good they were. Today, this would be considered an innovative, pragmatic, and viable project. Maybe it will happen in the next few years. Fifty years ago, clearly the world was not quite ready for it.

One new thing I learned about in reading the book was what McLuhan called the Tetrads, or the “laws of the media”. it stirkes me that these “laws” are actually highly relevant to strategic analysis of any industry which is undergoing rapid change. I still have to dig up the original material to interpret it properly, but the following is my loose interpretation of McLuhan’s Tetrads.

1. Any innovative technology enhances or accelerates some of what existed before.
[Q: What does it enhance or accelerate?]
2. Any innovative technology erodes or renders obsolescent some of what existed before.
[Q: What does it erode or obselesce?]
3. Any innovative technology retrieves something that has become obsolescent.
[Q: What does it retrieve that has eroded or become obsolescent?]
4. Any innovative technology, when pushed to the limits of its potential, reverses or flips into something entirely new.
[Q: What does it reverse or flip into?]

McLuhan used the telegraph as an example. Again adapting his work:
1. The telegraph amplified the reach of events, and changed daily news to instaneous news.
2. The telegraph rendered opinion based, local broadsheets obsolescent as people sought faster, broader news.
3. The telegraph brought back group involvement and discussion around events, which had been fading.
4. The telegraph flipped from one-on-one communication into multi-point broadcast, and reversed the corporate hoarding of information.

I am a strong believer in strategic questions (as briefly illustrated in the Future of Media report). Asking the right question is most of the way to getting the right answer. The strategic questions raised by McLuhan, if applied effectively as part of a strategy process, can be immensely valuable in understanding how specific new technologies will change us, and the opportunities they create. I will play with these questions more around some current issues, and will share anything interesting here.

Google has just released maps for use on mobiles, that indicate traffic congestion with four color levels from green to red, across 30 US cities. This is one of those applications that has been obvious forever, and it’s only been a question of time until it’s implemented well (which is not quite yet). When people are navigating traffic and choosing alternate routes, they have until now been guessing which way to go, having available at best a trickle of information in from the radio. In fact, traffic information is one of the main reasons that people listen to local radio. Once you can get far superior traffic information from other sources, you might as well go to the radio that gives you your preferred music or talk, which is unlikely to be local radio. Next steps include not just current traffic intensity, but also predicted traffic intensity. As I wrote in my book Living Networks, UK company Applied Generics has a product called RoDIN24, that anonymously monitors the movement of mobile phones relative to cell towers in order to provide extremely detailed and live views not just of where traffic is slow (mobile phones moving slowly), but also where traffic is converging to. Beyond that, computers will be able to predict reasonably accurately how long different routes will take, enabling drivers to make route choices without gazing at screens too much. Of course, these predictive devices will play off against each other – if every one made the same recommendation to their drivers, that route in turn would become congested. But in the long run, in congested urban traffic we will see the different possible routes taken even out, so that it takes a similar time whichever of the major possibilities you choose. Resource Shelf gives an overview of other traffic data resources. The US dominates, with some services also in the UK. As with good GPS mapping, there will be a several year lag for effective mobile traffic services to reach most other developed countries. As with many of these applications, it is the cost of mobile data that is a key driver. Cheap mobile data in the US is driving these kinds of applications. In countries where mobile data is very expensive, including Australia, it will, unfortunately, take a long time for mobile applications such as traffic data to take off.

Just to let readers know that the Future of Media Summit coverage and blog has moved over from this blog to the Future of Media Summit Participant Blog. This was created for blogging by all Sydney and San Francisco participants at the Future of Media Summit. It includes coverage of the event itself, the audience panels at the event, and discussion thereafter. This blog will continue to cover other topics on the future. As always, these are experiments, so no doubt later will morph into another form. Just email us if you'd like to participate in the new Future of Media blog.

I really like this. A Japanese researcher has created a lifelike doppelganger robot of himself, which he uses to do lectures at a university an hour’s drive away from his home, thus saving himself the commute. He is the live voice of the robot, and can see through its eyes. Pickups on his mouth and lips control the movement of the robot’s mouth while it is speaking. Apparently the robot looks very human – certainly the photos are hard to pick as a machine (though the machine does look less friendly than the man). While the cost of creating this kind of robot will never get very low, as every one must be custom-made, the implications are staggering. If the robot really is good, this is a big step beyond videoconferencing, and arguably even teleimmersion. Robot duplicates could be put on airplanes in lieu of people to go to distant meetings, for example. I will definitely explore the possibility of using one of these for keynote speeches I’m asked to deliver in distant lands, though I suspect it will be a good while before I have a duplicate of myself, unfortunately. Who hasn't dreamed of being in two places at the same time?

The live videostream for the Future of Media Summit is now available for pre-registration. Just go to the registration page, then at the time of the event login to the videostream. The live conference videostream is available free to anyone who cares to join us…
Live videostream times (first 3:30 hours from Sydney; last 2 hours from Sydney and San Francisco)
Sydney: 19 July, 8:30am-2pm
San Francisco: 18 July, 3:30-9pm
New York: 18 July, 6:30pm-12
London: 18 July 11:30pm – 19 July 5am

Hope you can join us…

Last Thursday I was interviewed by Tony Delroy on the Nightlife program, an ABC program broadcast nationally. We talked about the future in a broad ranging interview and talkback session spanning 40 minutes, covering topics including the digital divide, video everywhere, social response to technology, commoditization, doing business virtually, infinite content, virtual environments, and even teleportation. The entire interview is available as an mp3 download (14MB).

From the start, a key part of the idea for the Future of Media Summit was to create some interesting content that would provide a basis for discussion at the event. Something that would help people think in a structured and productive about what’s really happening in the world of media. The Future of Media Report 2006 is NOW! officially launched.

The Summit is on next July 18/19, simultaneously in Sydney and San Framcisco. Get thee along! It will be a mighty fine occasion, with well over a 100 people in Sydney, nigh on 50 in San Francisco, and a whole bunch globally on the live videostream. Check the website in the next couple of days about the live videostream. There'll also be some kind of "audience blogging" at the event, including people in all locations. If not, just read the report, and the event will leave a trail of participatory content behind it.

Some of the things you’ll find in the report:

Global media market highlights. In 32 years media will have doubled its share of the global economy. Newspaper revenue is stagnant, but television, driven by cable subscriptions, is growing healthily. The US is heavily overrepresented in the global media markets, boasting 42% of all revenue. However China’s media appetite is exploding.

Global media comparisons. Other countries are catching up to the US in online advertising, though classifieds is a particularly strong source of revenue growth in the US. Teens spend more total time with media than adults, but less time watching TV.

Emerging media relationships. The Washington Post far outstrips other major US newspapers in blog references per print copy, but still lags The Guardian. Almost half of all “mashups” are based on location. PhotoBucket outstrips the growth pace of MySpace.

Content creation and usage. Eighteen percent of Americans over 65 years old have created content on the Internet, showing it’s not just for teenagers. 37% of all blog posts are in Japanese, more than in English.

Media industry networks. Microsoft remains the company most central to global media alliances and joint ventures. Yahoo!, Apple, CBS, Viacom, and Sony Ericsson are among those that have become more central over the last five years.

The Future of Media Strategic Framework. A framework to pull together some of the many threads that make up the future of media, including the symbiosis of mainstream and social media, the consumer/ creator archetype, content, formats, revenue, distribution, globalization and localization, and intellectual property.

Five ideas transforming media. Key ideas include “time compression,” describing how people’s media consumption habits change when they get busier, and “infinite content,” about a world in which limitless media is available.

Media snippets. In 1892 there were 14 evening newspapers in London. Today there is just one. 36% of US high-school students believe that newspapers should get “government approval” before stories are published.

The main intent of the report is to build a conversation. So we do hope this sparksthoughts, comments, additions, disagreements, other stimulating stuff in this space.

The newspaper industry is really starting to feel the full force of the technological revolution and a number of titles are scaling back off-line resources in favour of their online editions. For example, The New York Times recently announced that it was cutting back its stockmarket price tables because readers were accessing this type of information online.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has announced that it had hired Adrian Holovaty (creator of Chicagocrime.org) to develop “mashups” that combine Google maps with statistical information on crime rates in the local area.

This is undoubtedly one way to go. In the future, newspapers will have to make their conversations with readers more of a two-way street, which means opening up stories to comment and sharing credit with the co-creators of news and analysis. But it’s not all hi-tech in medialand. In the UK, Piers Morgan (ex editor of the Daily Mirror), is launching a new newspaper aimed at children aged 9 to 12. Columnists could include celebrities such as Jamie Oliver, Richard Branson and David Beckham. The idea isn’t new. In France, Play Bac Presse has published three newspapers aimed at kids since 1995. The idea could work in the US too, given that parents spend over US $3 billion on kids books and the fact that the top 10 kids magazines has a combined circulation of 15 million.

What will the Internet look like in the year 2016? In case you haven't noticed, technology is developing exponentially so in ten years time the Internet will be something like a thousand times larger in terms of size and impact than it is today. The number of Internet users will most likely treble from 1 to 3 billion users and we will see the barriers between our physical selves and our virtual selves melt away. Our interaction with the Internet will also migrate from physical objects in fixed locations to mobile devices and devices invisibly embedded in our everyday environment.

In the future almost everything will be a computer and almost everything will be connected to everything else. Going further into the future, computers as we know them today won't exist. They will be embedded in our clothes and even our bodies and we will be able to access the Internet just by thinking about it. We will have full sensory links to people we've never met and to places we've never been. There will also be more things ("machines") connected to the Internet as RFID tags and sensor motes take off, creating vast sensor networks. Location tracking will also be built in to people and things, which will please some people. Search will still be big but it will include physical proximity and information will be linked to the reliability of the source. Everything will be ranked ­ including rankings. As for who owns or who controls the Internet, chances are governments will increase their interference as the Internet becomes a critical part of the global economy. This may mean that the centre of the Internet universe shifts away from the US, or it could mean the opposite if countries like China attempt to further restrict access, or the Internet becomes a government-run monopoly.