I love the media. I love reading articles, watching clips, commenting on the stories I care about and sharing them with others.
I grew up reading The Leader Post and The Globe and Mail, listening to CBC Radio at breakfast and oscillating between the 6:00 nightly newscasts on CTV, Global and CBC. After graduating from university, I worked for a local Calgary magazine called Calgary Living and spent the last 2.5 years in the sausage factory netherworld between public relations and the news media at CNW Group – formerly Canada News Wire – the largest behind the scenes distributor of news releases and other assorted multimedia in Canada.
Over the last several years, my lifelong fascination with all things media began to intersect with another obsession of mine: the Internet.
I first logged on at my father’s office 15 years ago as a wide-eyed 12 year old boy, immediately recognizing how powerful it was. I could instantly gain access to information on virtually any topic I desired. I was an early, unashamed Internet addict, spending long hours at my parents’ offices after work hours until we finally got connected at home.
When I downloaded my first MP3 in 1996, I knew a fundamental shift was underway. Before long I was a full blown copyright criminal; an accomplished music pirate with several thousand songs shared over a personal FTP server on my parents’ cable modem before I was even old enough to drive a car. I was the first kid in high school to get a CD burner, because what good was all that music if you had to sit in front of your computer to hear it? I even wrote a few ridiculous articles about burning CDs for MP3.com, (I lied about my age) when it was still the biggest aggregator of music piracy know-how on the net.
Before long, I fundamentally changed the way I consumed content. No longer hampered by the size of my allowance or my summer earnings, I became an aficionado of music. I discovered bands I never would have come across were I relegated solely to to listening to radio stations and watching Much Music, (I remember when they actually played music videos most of the time).
I was empowered. The cat was out of the bag. The toothpaste was out of the tube. I was never going back to the old way of doing things.
As it turns out, neither was anyone else. Napster, KaZaa and a litany of other defunct peer-to-peer (P2P) applications eventually gave rise to the mighty torrent. The content expanded to anything that could be digitized. Books, TV shows, and full movies, even perfect DVD copies, were suddenly up for grabs.
I remember a close friend’s glee when he downloaded every Beatles song, (studio recordings, b-sides and bootlegs) in one click in 2004. Five years later, he still has all his favorites on his iPod.
Of course, the exponential growth of computer power, the Internet and the increase in the price-performance of digital technology (e.x. my cell phone is ten times more powerful than a computer purchased for $1000 10 years ago) was the great facilitator of this process. It created opportunities for revolutionary technologies like the iPod.
The existing archaic copyright laws were no match for the world’s largest copying machine.
It took a while, but the open Internet I watched swallow the record industry as a teenager finally did the same with the media I grew up with. CanWest Global , the owners of The Leader Post and Global television, continues to teeter on the abyss of bankruptcy. CTVglobemedia, (owners of The Globe and Mail) isn’t faring well either. CBC, our publicly funded national broadcaster, is facing similarly tough times eventhough advertising revenue is only a component of their bottom line.
Advertising, as the pillar of the broadcast media business model, is crumbling.
Over the last few years, I’ve watched the same Internet P2P technology take over the world of news. Twitter is now my personal social newswire feed. I follow friends and leaders that share interesting content and share the best nuggets of content I find from all my sources with my own friends and followers across several social media platforms. Furthermore, I find myself taking pictures with the intention of sharing them and feeling inspired to write knowing that someone will actually read what I have to say. The network of bloggers, professional journalists, academics, and new media professionals I follow provide me with a unique perspective that takes great effort to curate effectively. I use RSS, podcasts, blogs, twitter, along with many of the traditional media sources and networks to stay plugged in to the information world I’ve organized for myself. Through these methods, I dramatically reduced the amount of advertising I am exposed to daily.
For the record, I am not against copyright laws. But I do think that the Internet and the democratization of technology are helping us recognize that laws of the 20th Century were overly skewed in one direction.
I believe we need to work to strike the appropriate balance between user-rights and the rights of the content creator. We need professional journalists, musicians, actors, authors, artists, inventors, coders and engineers to have a resilient, vibrant democracy. To have these professionals, we need to find a way to ensure they are paid for their hard work and the intellectual property they produce. Yet, after I began studying copyright more carefully in the last year of my political science degree, I quickly recognized that all culture is derivative, in that it builds on previous work. We are all truly standing standing on the shoulders of giants. Furthermore, all of humanity’s future intellectual pursuits will continue to be derived from an understanding of the research and works created by others in the past.
Our system needs to balance the extremes of “everything is free for the taking!” and “everything idea you see, hear or use is going to cost you!” to ensure we can pay the creators while leaving their content open to be used to create derivative works.
It is in this spirit that recommend my friend Duncan Kinney’s recent article “How hacker investors could save the media.” I love articles like this one that examine how the media must reinvent itself on the open web. Finding new, effective business models is crucial to ensuring we can continue to pay for the journalists and media professionals necessary to hold the powerful accountable. Duncan starts from the premise that these organizations must innovate or go extinct and derives a sensible investment strategy for these lumbering behemoths. While web 2.0 is important and I am optimistic about our ability to open up government and hold our leaders accountable through technological innovation, Duncan rightly points out that in the interim large media organizations are still important because they “have the clout to get access, a legacy of fact-checking and the money to afford lawyers.” I agree with him, these are not unimportant details.
If you want to learn more about these issues I highly recommend that you read Michael Geist’s blog, listen to TVO’s Search Engine and read anything you can get your hands on by Lawrence Lessig. And while you’re at it, go check out creativecommons.org
One thing is is certain. The toothpaste is out of the inter-tubes and we can’t put it back in.
