'Kid with modem' a new Gutenberg?

Here's one to think about -- it's titled "Kid with Modem vs. CNN," and it's by, well, a kid with a modem in Beijing, China, who wrote it for That's Beijing magazine and posted it Jan. 5, 2004, to Danwei, which bills itself as a "website about media, advertising, and urban life in China." Obscure enough?

But from this odd corner of the English-speaking world comes an interesting and, I think, very thought-provoking take on new media.

Goldkorn, who is originally from Singapore, says the world of weblogs is creating a "publishing revolution ... and it's not being funded by venture capitalists nor by the nameless powers that hippies call 'the media'." A revolution, eh? Pretty strong language, isn't it? Well, Goldkorn says it's justified. And I think he makes his case.

That's partly because he doesn't try to hype the subject. He admits, for example, most blogs will make your eyes glaze over:

As in the rest of the world, most Chinese blogs are excruciatingly boring accounts of minor incidents in the lives of college students, and breathless comments about new bits of code written by computer nerds. But there’s other stuff too: well-written observations of daily life in big cities like Beijing but also in small towns that you've never heard of in rural Zhejiang.

And then there is Mu Zi Mei, a young Guangzhou journalist who kept a blog about her one night stands, sometimes naming names and rating performance."

I've never heard of Zhejiang, or Mu Zi Mei for that matter, but what Goldkorn says about them rings true, as well. It also rings true, sadly, that Mu Zi Mei lost her job when word got out about her blog. The same thing happened to a House Republican staffer in Washington, D.C., when she evaluated her associates' performance on a blog.

Then there's this. As Goldkorn puts it:

So where are blogs going in China and elsewhere? You can’t really listen to most bloggers about the subject because they tend to view everything through the prism of their current site traffic, which is about as relevant to the future of media, the Internet and everything as a wok full of cold fish. It is probably better to forget about the word blog which is just the jargon term du jour, and think of it this way:

In Europe, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of a printing press that used movable type in 1436 brought down the price of printed materials and made such materials available for the masses, paving the way for mass literacy and enabling reading and writing to spread way beyond the enclosed walls of the monastries of the dark ages.

In the early 21st century, online publishing technology allows a kid with a modem to compete with CNN for your attention. Wherever the kid is, wherever you are.

Wherever we are, too.

COMM 150: PoMo in WashPo?

... which means, if you keep up with the trendier buzzwords in the national media, postmodernism (sometimes called "PoMo" for short) in The Washington Post. In today's Post, op-ed writer Robert Samuelson has a column titled "Capitalism's Next Stage." It doesn't mention postmodernism by name, but it's surely a clear, crisp explanation of how the postmodern world came about.

At the very least, Samuelson's column shows how economic trends have helped promote the decentering and fragmentation so important to postmodernist philosophers and media critics.

Samuelson's thesis is the 19th-century economy produced a "managerial revolution" that replaced one-man enterprises like John Jacob Astor's fur-trading empire with large, concentrated industries that required centralized management -- and thus, central managers. And in turn, he adds, the giant industries of the 19th and 20th centuries have been all but replaced in the 21st by a scattering of small, specialized enterprises that operate somewhat independently of each other.

Samuelson cites a study by retired Harvard Business School professor Alfred D. Chandler Jr., 88, who said the economy of the late 1800s and almost all the 1900s was essentially managerial. Samuleson says:

Until Chandler, the [history of the] emergence of big business was all about titans. The Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords were either "robber barons" whose greed and ruthlessness allowed them to smother competitors and establish monopolistic empires. Or they were "captains of industry" whose genius and ambition laid the industrial foundations for modern prosperity. But when Chandler meticulously examined business records, he uncovered a more subtle story. New technologies (the railroad, telegraph and steam power) favored the creation of massive businesses that needed -- and in turn gave rise to -- superstructures of professional managers: engineers, accountants and supervisors.

Take railroads, for example. They required managers to look after rolling stock, coordinate schedules and centralize operations. Samuelson:

Elsewhere the story was similar. Companies didn't achieve lower costs simply by adopting new technologies or building bigger factories. No matter how efficient a plant might be, it would be hugely wasteful if raw materials did not arrive on time or if the output couldn't be quickly distributed and sold. Managers were essential; so were statistical controls. Coordination and organization mattered. Companies that surmounted these problems succeeded.

But now the economy has changed. Samuelson explains:

The trouble now is that the defining characteristics of Chandler's successful firms have changed. For example, many were "vertically integrated" -- they controlled raw materials, manufactured products and sold to the public. AT&T made electronic components, produced telecommunications equipment and sold phone services. But in many new industries, vertical integration has virtually vanished, as economists Naomi Lamoreaux of UCLA, Peter Temin of MIT and Daniel Raff of the University of Pennsylvania argue in a recent study. The computer industry is hugely splintered. Some firms sell components (Intel, AMD), some software (Microsoft, SAP), some services (IBM, EDS), some hardware (Dell, Apple). There's overlap, but not much.

It's also true that old, established firms -- despite ample capital and technical know-how -- often don't dominate new industries. Google, eBay and Yahoo rule the Internet, not General Motors, Sears or Disney.

To be sure, we understand some of these developments. Older firms often suffer from their own success; managers become wedded to existing products, technologies and procedures. We can also identify many of the forces reshaping business: new technologies, globalization and modern finance (pressure for higher profits; corporate "buyouts" by private equity firms). But the very multitude of trends and pressures is precisely the problem. No one has yet synthesized them and given them larger meaning.

But what does this have to do with postmodernism? This, I think: It's another form of fragmentation.

And what does it have to do with mass communications? Well, look back at Samuelson's list of new industries. Relative startups like Google and eBay. Dot-coms, every one. Samuelson concludes:

Just as John Jacob Astor defined a distinct stage of capitalism, we may now be at the end of what Chandler perceptively called "managerial capitalism." Managers, of course, won't disappear. But the new opportunities and pressures on them and their companies may have altered the way the system operates. Chandler admits as much. Asked about how the corporation might evolve, he confesses ignorance: "All I know is that the commercializing of the Internet is transforming the world." To fill that void, someone must do for capitalism's next stage what Chandler did for the last.

COM 150 -- Oct. 25 -- QUIZ

Referring to our textbook Media Now and/or information you find on the World Wide Web, post your answers to the questions below as comments to this blog post:

1. What was the first message transmitted over the Advanced Research and Projects Network (a predecessor of the Internet)? What does that tell you about the nature of the Internet, about computers, about life in general?

2. Post-modernist philosopher Jean-François Lyotard says contemporary society is losing its "grand narratives" (the French for "big stories," or commonly accepted myths, values and beliefs). How did he say the communications media contribute to this breakdown? Do you agree with him or not? Does the Internet contribute to a fragmentation of "grand narratives?"

Popular culture -- excellent portal -- COM 150

Here's a website that tells you what you need to know about popular culture and gets you started on finding out the stuff you want to know. It's by T.V. Reed (I'm not kidding about his initials), an American Studies professor at Washington State University in Pullman.

Reed includes resources on "forms of popular culture including music, film, television, advertising, sports, fashion, toys, magazines and comic books, and the medium in which this message moves, cyberculture." He also includes lots of links.

Of the links, Reed says

As with all Internet sites, the locations referenced vary in quality and usefulness. Some are commercial sites valuable more as objects of knowledge than as producers of knowledge. Others are academic sites that teach ways to analyze pop culture, or offer substantial resources for doing your own analyses.

Since the Internet seldom, if ever, provides all the information needed on a given topic, I also strongly recommend that you consult my bibliography of books on popular culture, and use that old-fashioned, non-virtual space known as the library.

Now there's a concept. The library! And you don't even have to go to Pullman, Wash., to fine one. We have one at SCI, too.

COMM 150 -- class discussion

A couple of questions: Please post your answers as comments to this post.

1. Who was Philo Farnsworth?

2. Why didn't he want his children to watch television?

3. What does this tell you about the early development of the medium? Does it still hold true today? Why? Or why not?

Dinasaur watch No. 1 -- news or comedy?

COMM 150 and COMM 207 students take note (and COMM 221 students notice the format for the news release, which is a model of good PR work) --

Want to know why the "mainstream" news media are in trouble? Here's one indicator. It's a news release from Indiana University quoting Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications, who did research showing the Daily SHow with Jon Stewart "is just as substantive as network [news] coverage." Says the release:

Not surprisingly, a second-by-second analysis of The Daily Show's audio and visual content found considerably more humor than substance -- Stewart himself has insisted that he is a comedian and not a journalist. A similar analysis of network coverage found considerably more hype than substance in broadcast newscasts. Examples of such hype included references to polls, political endorsements and photo opportunities.

"Interestingly, the average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories were not significantly different than the average amounts of visual and audio substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories about the presidential election," she wrote in the paper.

"It should be noted that the broadcast network news stories about the presidential election were significantly shorter, on average, than were The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories," she added. "The argument could be made that while the amount of substance per story was not significantly different, the proportion of each story devoted to substance was greater in the network news stories ... On the other hand, the proportion of stories per half hour program devoted to the election campaign was greater in The Daily Show."

Fox's conclusion was not a happy one -- "neither one is particularly substantive. It's a bottom-line industry and ratings-driven. We live in an 'infotainment' society, and there certainly are a number of other sources available."

Question: If the network news departments are dinosaurs, is The Daily Show one of those sleek little mammals running around in the underbrush waiting to inherit the earth?

Dinosaur watch No. 2 -- is Bloomberg a mammal?

COMM 150, COMM 207 students read --

Today's issue of Slate.com, the electronic magazine, has a story on the Bloomberg business news wire service. It's thriving, and Slate's media critic Jack Shafer tells why:

Daily newspapers didn't see the lucrative news and information opportunity Bloomberg did for the same reason they didn't enter the Web search business when it was green. As mature and graying industries, newspapers are mortified by the creative destruction of changing markets, so they take only tiny and confused steps—mostly backwards. Years after the Web had made newspaper stock tables obsolete, the dailies started to prune and discontinue them, but how many added something of greater value in the form of new columnists or graphs that explained changing markets? Bloomberg's genius, and I don't use that term lightly, was to exploit how deeply people who need information will dig into their pockets to pay for it.

Let's read it and discuss it in class. An alternative: If we don't want to talk about it in class, I can always assign you to write about it.