From the September 12th Individuated Media newsletter
If you’re the publisher or editor of a publication or a producer of broadcasts, the 2020s are akin to what the 1450s were for the talented monks who hand-copied books in medieval scriptoria. Like them then, your future now depends upon a pivotal choice you must make: adopt a daunting new technology to do better the essential purpose of your job? Or cling to how your job has traditionally been done, even though that is becoming ever increasingly difficult to sustain?
It’s reasonable to assume that in the decades immediately after Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press, the monks in scriptoria were probably anxious, if not outraged.
The Individuated Media newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
For more than a millennium, holy men like themselves had labored by hand with pen, ink, and parchment, to copy and produced books, normally Bibles. Each tonsured monk had spent years apprenticing in a scriptorium before he was allowed to copy the Christian holy book. A well-trained monk could produce a 773,000-word Latin Vulgate Bible in 12 to 18 months, and twice that time if the book was to be ‘illuminated’ with goldleaf and illustrations.
By comparison, Gutenberg’s mechanical contraption could produce 30 to 90 books (albeit without illustrations) per year, more than a monk could produce in a lifetime.
Moreover, Gutenberg wasn’t a holy man like the monks, who each had years or decades of religious training and the sanction of the church to copy Bibles. He was a metallurgist and mere tradesman instead. His printing device bypassed centuries of what the monks deemed hallowed doctrines and sacrosanct practices about how to produce books, particularly Bibles.
Faced with Gutenberg’s new technology, what choice did the monks make? They chose to continue copying books by hand, as their predecessors traditionally had for centuries. The monks chose to compete with the printing press.
Within the next four decades, Gutenberg and others using his technology produced between 30,000 and 40,000 Bibles and other books (about topics such as astronomy, navigation, medicine, agriculture, philosophy, history, etc.), according to modern historians’ estimates. That was more books than all scriptoria monks in history ever produced. The resultant explosive growth in information catalyzed the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment, and changed the world.
By the year 1500, most scriptoria had closed. Their monks had switched to supporting their monasteries by other pursuits, such as agriculture, animal husbandry, viniculture, brewing, etc. All new books were printed by presses operated by secular tradesmen. It wasn’t until 1998, half a millennium later, that a scriptorium, staffed by the Benedictine monks of St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, produced what is believed to be the first hand-copied Bible since the Renaissance. It took the modern monks 13 years to produce it.
I unequivocally declare that Gutenberg didn’t put the scriptoria monks out-of-business. They did that themselves. They made the wrong choice. They myopically mistook the purpose of their jobs to be the production of books copied by hand. They failed to realize that the true purpose of their jobs was to spread the scriptures of their religion (or as they might have said, ‘to spread the word of God’). Their true purpose was to make as many Bibles as possible, which Gutenberg’s press technology did exponentially better than their pens, inks, and parchments ever could. Had I been a media management consultant during the mid-15th rather than early-21st Century, I would have resolutely advise the monks to purchase, learn, and adopt printing press technologies. Had they done so, their monasteries might still be major publishing houses today.
So, if you’re a media publisher, editor, academician, or anyone else today working in the Mass Media industries, what can learn from the scriptoria monks’ experience? Like them, you now face the challenge of new technologies that are already epochally transforming the world’s media environment. More than Gutenberg’s printing presses did. Novel technologies that are devastating the old ways of producing media. Do you cling to how your company for decades or centuries has traditionally produced and delivered news, entertainment, or other information, despite competition from the new technologies are demonstratively making that increasingly unsustainable? Or do you accept change, learn, and adopt the new technologies, not only to save your career but simply new technologies let you more efficiently perform the true purpose of your job? It’s a fundamental choice. And that choice is yours.
What exactly are these new media technologies and the true purpose of your job?
The new media technologies are manifestations of the algorithmic recommendation engine. I say manifestation because an algorithmic recommendation engine isn’t anything mechanical or even physical, but instead is an advanced task accomplished virtually by an integrated circuit. The processing power of integrated circuits (commonly called ‘computer chips’) has been exponentially growing since their invention in 1958. An observation formulated seven years later, known as ‘Moore’s Law’, noted their power has and is doubling every 24 months. This extraordinary pace led to the pocket calculator in 1967, the personal computer in 1977, and the smartphone in 1992 (the first of which wasn’t the Apple iPhone).
Yet as the second millennium ended and the third began, this exponential progress began manifesting itself not as new physical devices but instead as the accomplishments of unprecedented or previously thought improbable or impossible tasks, such as self-driving automobiles and recently artificial intelligence (‘AI’)
Although a few media futurists during the 1990s predicted the rise of algorithmic recommendation engines, the hidebound Mass Media industries shortsightedly ignored the predictions and have become increasingly devastated as the repercussion.
During the past 25 years, more than 5 billion of the world’s 8 billion people have begun using online services, based upon algorithmic recommendation engines, as their predominant means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information, and have consequently increasingly abandoned routine usage of the Mass Media industries’ products and services. Advertisers have followed those billions of consumers. The overall results are that the products and services of the Mass Media are becoming increasingly unpopular; their audiences fewer; their subscriptions and advertising revenues are evaporating; their employment ranks decimated; and their brands, built over decades, are becoming antiquated. And all of that is happening at nearly the speed of Moore’s Law.
Although I can cite plenteous examples, look at the sector of Mass Media with the longest experience competing against algorithmic recommendation engine media: the U.S> newspaper industry. Since 2005, it has lost 60 and 70 percent of its readership (i.e., circulation); 80 percent of its advertising; 42 percent of its annual revenues (but 75 percent when adjusted for more than 20 years of inflation); and 75 percent of its employees. Similar gaping losses have occurred in the newspaper industries of most other developed, as well as in the local and national radio and local television sectors of all those nations.
So formidable in the media environment are algorithmic recommendation engines that just two companies whose entire services are based upon algorithmic recommendation engines, namely Alphabet (owner and operator of Google and YouTube) and Meta (owner and operator of Facebook and Instagram), nowadays reap more than half of the world’s national and local online advertising revenues (which has become the largest category of advertising worldwide). The two companies have been among the fastest growing companies of any type in world history.
Are such companies indeed media companies? More than five billion consumers think so. Meta alone has 2.7 billion regular users, more than double the number of the world’s largest traditional Mass Media company, China Central TeleVision (‘CCTV’). The crucial and obvious difference is that if all 1.3 billion users of CCTV tune to its main television channel, they will each see exactly the same broadcast, yet if all 2.7 billion users of Meta’s Facebook users access its main page for them, each will simultaneously see am entirely different mix of news, entertainment, and other information than any other, a mix based upon that individual user’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes.
Today’s algorithmic recommendation engines can be taxonomically divided into two different categories: the Individuated Media industries and Agentic Artificial Intelligence.
Individuated Media industries comprise the search engines, the social media services, and some format-specific companies (such as Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, YuKu, etc.) All their services are based upon algorithmic recommendation engine technologies. Each provides upon demand or a steady stream of news, entertainment, or other informational recommendations, based upon that user’s own explicit requests, ‘likes’, and comments, previous usages and viewings, network of friends, and other individual factors, plus algorithmically calculated psycho-demographic constructs about that person, not just the basic traditional demographics of gender, age, and location, which the Mass Media industries use.
Although most of the largest Individuated Media companies weren’t originally founded to be media companies, as millions, then billions, of consumers during the past 25 years discovered that they could receive an individualized feed of news, entertainment, and other information, from the companies, the companies’ executives were agile businesspeople who recognized that huge demand, then shifted the purpose of their companies to satisfy it.
The newest manifestation of algorithmic recommendation engines is Agentic Artificial Intelligence. As that name indicates, these use Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’), today’s state-of-the-art of integrated circuit technologies. Surveys indicate that 1.5 to 1.8 billion people worldwide have used AI and that 500 to 600 million of them use it on a daily basis. The primary vendors of AI are the major Individuated Media companies themselves (Meta, Alphabet’s Google Gemini, etc.) and by ‘pure play’ startup companies (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) All of their AI services include Agentic Artificial Intelligence subservices that can provide each consumer with innumerable customized services, including AI ‘agents’ that fetch individuated selections of news, entertainment, and other information from virtually all Mass Media industries worldwide (currently without any reimbursement to those industries).
Moreover, the continuing acceleration of Moore’s Law has enabled Agentic Artificial Intelligence to be offered from within the newest advanced personal computers (such the NVIDIA’s Spark and Apple’s Studio line of new personal computers). AI that used to require sizeable data centers operated by large technology companies can now literally fit into a personal computer the size of a hardcover book and cost less than US$6,000. Control and operation of Agentic Artificial Intelligence has begun to shift from ‘Big Tech’ companies and into the hands of consumers themselves.
The clearly demonstrable popularity and phenomenal business successes of the Individuated Media industries, plus the rocketing pace and widespread implementation of Agentic Artificial Intelligence worldwide should make obvious to anyone working in media that the commanding media trend during the first quarter of the 21st Century, and probably the second quarter as well, has been the individuation of media, propelled by algorithmic recommendation engines. Although the capabilities of the Mass Media industries eponymously are mass production and mass reach, the evolution of algorithmic recommendation engines has added a third capability: simultaneous mass customization of contents. Thus, as the Industrial Era of analog media production technologies yields to the Informational Era’s digital media production technologies, an epochal change has been wrought in the world’s media environment.
The Industrial Era analog media of only mass production and mass read is already over, which is why the Mass Media industries are in grave decline. No new revamp of a company’s website, no erection or removal of a paywall, no company’s consumer ‘engagement’ program, no additions of Wordle or other games, no conversion from profit to profit-for-profit legal status, no etcetera, will revive most sectors of the Mass Media industries. No product or service involving mass production and mass reach but not mass customization will prevail anymore (except perhaps in the cinema and books sectors of the Mass Media industries). More than 25 years of reality in the media environment has already proven these statements.
So, if the true purpose of your media employment is to inform people about the news, or to entertain them, or to provide them with some other category of information, then today the choice you must make is whether to learn a new technology that can provide masses of people with a better feed of those contents than the traditional practices of the Mass Media industries can or else cling to those traditional practices as the new technology of algorithmic recommendation engines demonstrably continues to obsolesce those practices. That choice is basically sustenance and success or else obsolescence and failure. Don’t make the wrong choice that the scriptoria monks made more than five centuries ago.
What indeed is the true purpose of your work? People will always need or want news, entertainment, and other information. And they will each seek those from whomever or whatever company they think provides to them a mix of contents that they believe best satisfies their own unique needs, interests, and tastes. The dawning Informational Era’s Individuated Media clearly does that better than the waning Industrial Era’s analog technologies of printing press or broadcast transmitters can. Remember too that individuated products and services needn’t be absolutely such. An editor or producer can include in a service all bulletin level or urgent stories about which he thinks everyone needs to be informed then program the algorithmic recommendation engine to individuate the selection of all lesser stories. (See my May 12th newsletter about how any media company, even a small one, can individuate services immediately and for less than $10,000 in equipment expenses.)
The wisdom and experience of publishers, editors, and broadcast producers is sorely needed in this new epoch of individuation. Rather than be objective, almost all the algorithm programming that the social media companies use in the Individuated Media services they offer to consumers are designed to be bias towards addiction. Consumers who utilize Agentic Artificial Intelligence will free themselves from that bias, yet most of them will need expert help composing prompts that allow their AI agents to recognize and routinely use authoritative and objective sources and critical thinking.
The scriptoria monks of the 15th Century had renowned expertise about books but obtusely chose not to combine their hard-won expertise with the new technology of their time.
Don’t obsolesce your career and yourself like the scriptoria monks did themselves.
#