Personal media and the human community

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Summer, 2002 by Shigeru Miyagawa

We made a big mistake three hundred years ago when we separated technology and humanism. It's time to put the two back together.

--Michael Dertouzos, former director of the Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We are in the midst of a transition from the industrial age to the information age, a change that will touch every aspect of our lives, and even more of our children. But what, exactly, will change? I want to focus this question on something I am particularly interested in--the nature of media.

How will the information age alter forms and uses of media? A good place to start is with the paramount symbol of the industrial age, Henry Ford's manufacturing assembly line. The one-size-fits-all business philosophy created mass markets for automobiles, washing machines, and other industrial-age goods. Media, in the form of printed publications and later radio and ultimately television, were exploited for the mass-marketing of these goods. In one way or another, mass media served to attract the public to the goods through advertisement. Just as market share was the standard by which goods were measured, mass media that appealed to the largest number of people--one size fits really all--was deemed most successful. "Mass media" was a product of the industrial age, and vice versa; so, what will become of media in the information age?

We're starting to see hints of what to expect. Business executives are bemoaning the fragmentation of mass markets, which they and their predecessors created with mass media. Not coincidentally, advertising revenue of network TV is plummeting by billions of dollars. People are flocking more and more to forms of media that are not amenable to the mass-market conception of broadcast media. These are media forms that have some sort of interactivity built into them. What is striking about them is that these forms of media are exactly the opposite of mass media. Instead of broadcasting carefully crafted content for mass consumption, the interactive forms of media are making it possible for users not only to consume media but also to create it. This is what Robert Metcalfe calls "community" media--media created by individuals for their own personal community of people. (1) will call it personal media, to contrast it with mass media.

Getting Personal

To understand personal media, a good place to start J with an observation by the late Michael Dertouzos, who was the director of the Laboratory for Compute Science at MIT: "We made a big mistake three hundred years ago when we separated technology and humanism. It's time to put the two back together."

The obsession with video games, and with other forms of media, finds an explanation in the works of humanists. Interactivity means that the user has some control over the content. In speaking of literary work Roland Barthes argued that the ultimate goal is to make the reader be no longer a consumer, but a producer of the content. He points out that this is exactly the opposite of classical literature, which draws a clear line between the producer of the text and its user.(2) The idea is simple: Break down the distinction between the producer and the consumer of the media.

As a point of illustration, let me begin with something that happened at home last summer. I have a young daughter who is not quite speaking yet, but she has acquired numerous tools for communication. One such tool that she uses often is this: Whenever I do something that she likes, such as singing one of her favorite songs, and she wants me to do it again, she'll point her two index fingers up and say, "ah, ah, ah." She learned this from my wife and I saying "one more time" while making the gesture of "one" with our index finger; she learned to amplify the message by using both index fingers. Over the summer, she had been allowed to watch some TV. One day, she was watching Sesame Street, and Big Bird sang a song and did a dance to go along with the song. She liked it, and at the end of the song and the dance, she turned to Big Bird on the screen, and did her thing with the index fingers and said, "ah, ah, ah." Big Bird, of course, did not respond, but instead went on to whatever was next in the script. My daughter turned to me with a puzzled look, as if to say, "What happened?" What happened was that she had had her first encounter with mass media.

In mass media, there is a clear line of demarcation between those who produce the media and those who consume it. My daughter wanted a hand in the production of Sesame Street, without realizing that the whole point of mass media is that you sit back and consume it. My daughter didn't know this, because up to that point, her entire world had been a personal one, where she could manipulate things and people to her needs.

Compare this example of mass media to a form of media that has spread throughout the youth culture, video games. Video games give a sense that you can control the content--in fact, the more that you are able to do so, the more successful you are. You get more points and get bumped up to a more challenging level. Video games are an example of personal media; the user has a say in what happens.