aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Remembering 1994

I ran a cable access operation and was negotiating a new franchise on a TCI cable system in 1994. I know and have feared the name Leo Hindry. So I read with interest John Batelle’s reaction to Hendry’s claim today:

that the Yahoo and Google’s of the world are temporary phenomena - and that soon all that will matter is distributors (the cable and telco guys, natch), and content (their pals at Disney, of course). Yahoo and Google, et al, will fold because they don’t own rights to content packages like movies, and they don’t control distribution, like cable companies and telcos.

This guy is deeply, hilariously wrong. TechDirt points out the first reason - he’s missing that folks don’t go online for content alone, in fact, they go online to communicate, converse, and to declare who they are in the world. Sure, they also expect content to be there, but increasingly, it ain’t Time Warner’s or Disney’s, it’s YouTube or blogs. And if the Disney’s of the world want to succeed on the Web, they best learn from the habits of the web natives, and not shove mid 1990s media models down their throats.

I’ve been thinking lately that The Cartel is doing advocates of a cultural commons - a place where we are all producers of content rather than merely consumers - a great big favor. While they’re busy locking up tight all of their content, they’re leaving a void online that is being filled by us.

In 1994 when I was working in community media production we had only our television habit. We couldn’t understand or conceive of television as anything other than what we knew it to be. Right now we’re defining a new media platform, and we’re defining it as something homemade and remixed.

The problem in 1994 wasn’t a lack of talent or creativity. It was the time, money and complexity of production, the constant battle for (cable) distribution, and an audience that wasn’t allowed out of its cable box. Each and every one of those issues has been addressed.

What the media industry doesn’t see is that it is forcing us away from those 6 hours we used to spend in front of the TV, and giving us the opportunity to grow into producers who will use those hours making media of our own. Let’s run with it!