Traditional media and the new media audience

It is within these three characteristics that we might begin to discern the battleground for control and creativity within Australia’s media. They can be summarised as follows:

• interaction is the new content: by which I mean that there is an increased significance within the media of human interaction, as opposed to the previously dominant processes of creation, distribution, reception or discussion of content;
• distracted and fascinated: by which I mean the rise of user or audience behaviours that simultaneously embody much greater levels of engagement with media while at the same time reflecting an attitude in which users are easily distracted; and
• you can get it for “free”: by which I mean that media consumers understand that while some media and some information must be, should be, and often is paid for, that equivalent, similar or better media and information products can be obtained at no apparent or extra cost.

It should be obvious how the Internet has led to these changes. However much people utilise the Internet to play games, download music, search for information and the like, the predominant utility of the net is communication. Email, chat and interchanges in discussion forums have always been central to the Internet. In this sense, the Internet is not “media” per se but “communications”.

Successful Internet activities - games, profiles, community websites - serve as the venue and rationale for that most desired and yet often elusive of human endeavours - connection with others like ourselves, through mediated communication.

The Internet also leads to greater levels of deep engagement, because so much of what is “done” there requires users to actively create their environment. This can apply in the use of imagination in text-based cybersex, or complex digital labour for world-building in Second Life.

At the same time, through multi-tasking and the particular nature of the computer environment (where one can appear to be doing one thing to outsiders, while engaged easily in multiple tasks), the Internet is a “distracted” environment. In another vein, the ease of pursuing narrow interests in depth online (for example searching for elusive details) lends itself to fascination, while the extraordinary variety of information available, one hyperlink click, away distracts - even as it leads us into new fascinations.

Finally, the Internet has always carried with it, for many reasons, the idea that what we want can be found there for free. While this idea is as much cultural construction as real situation (the Internet is never free), nevertheless, many people understand the Internet as being “free” when compared to other possibilities.

A generation of younger Internet users have grown up downloading pirate music (and now video) files without either paying for them, or paying for the Internet access itself. Endless varieties of software can be had for no cost from the open source sources. Email, chat, website and blogging services are all free (supported by advertising revenue). Finally, the very quality of immediacy of access to vast stores of information that might otherwise take a little time, effort or money to retrieve, creates the illusion and often reality that there is a free lunch.

What the Internet has done (so far, and with much more to come), has been to create a new form of media user-audience marked by a desire to interact with others, being both distracted and engaged at the same time, and understanding the world in terms of what can be got “for free” which might otherwise cost money.

Of course, this audience is - like all audiences - a plausible fiction necessary for the construction of products and services that will then permit a real audience to emerge in response to them. However it is a very different audience to that with which big media (and the government that serves its interests) is either familiar, or comfortable. Yet, nevertheless, media corporations attempt to engage this audience in terms which will profit them.

For example, Channel Seven and Yahoo combine to launch Yahoo7, long after Ninemsn, and champion the role and value of “user-generated content”. Yet they miss the point that whether the content is generated by users or by Yahoo7, it is the interaction - the communication and sense of connection - which matters most. Content - continuously imagined to be the “killer app” of the Internet which would unleash corporate profit - is only important as the focus and reference point for mediated human communication.

Similarly, Telstra and other Internet service providers understand the significance of high-speed networks for profitable premium-content delivery, as if the computer-based audience is directly equivalent to the DVD-playing, TV watching audience (while noting that people are now, more and more, members of both audiences). The smooth, disengaged spectatorship of televisually produced media sits uneasily alongside the multi-tasking, easily distracted patterns of Internet engagement.

A simple problem lies at the heart of the engagement between traditional media’s new approach and the new media audience. The trend in media is towards direct profit-making (think pay-per-view, subscription TV, premium content) and less reliance on advertising supported models. Yet the new media audience increasingly spends time on mediated interaction (chat, email, skype and more) from which it is almost impossible to make money, except for limited advertising revenues (who ever clicks those ads in MSN or Yahoo Messenger?).

Distraction-fascination makes it difficult to build a loyal audience who will be consistently satisfied and attentive to sell to advertisers in any case; and of course, “free” tends to lead this new media audience to seek out less expensive or free replacements to what is offered for a price by one provider.

Of course, media business will do what business does best - find ways to make money. But those businesses may not be the traditional ones whose entrenched expectations and understandings of “audiences” are not well aligned to the novel features we now find shaping audienceship for new media. The interacting, simultaneously fascinated and distracted, free-seeking consumers of media and mediated experiences pose more challenges than technologies and regulations combined.