This website operates as a primer for anyone who wants to learn more about Individuated Media, a new genus of media that is already in use by more than 5.7 billion people worldwide and has superseded Mass Media as the predominant means by which they obtain news, entertainment, and other information.
Unlike the media products and services that arose from the analog technologies of the now waning Industrial Era, which colloquially became known as the ‘Mass Media’ due to their mass production and mass reach, the Individuated Media’s services have arisen entirely from the computer-mediated (‘digital’) technologies of the dawning Informational Era. Individuated Media are a new genus of media, distinct from Mass Media because they offer not only mass production and mass reach but also mass customization or even total individuation.
With a Mass Media company’s product or service, all recipients simultaneously receive the same content (or selections of contents) from that company. However, each recipient of an Individuated Media company’s service receives unique content (or selection of contents) based upon that individual’s own unique mix of needs interests, and tastes. This individuated selection can better satisfy the individual than can any generic or demographically-selected selection from a Mass Media company.
Examples of Individuated Media companies include Google, Baidu, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Vkontakte, Pandora, etc. Such companies, among the fastest growing in world history, became phenomenally popular and hugely rich, primarily at the expense of the Mass Media industries, whose popularity and revenues have been dimming along with the era from which they arose.
If you now work for a Mass Media company, much of your job is ‘managing decline’. I sympathize. My 47 years working in media provides me with perspective.
When the Mass Media industries during the mid-1990s formulated their myopic strategy for adapting the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the media environment, that strategy seemed to make sense in those years when going online meant plugging a wired telephone connection into a 600-baud dialup modem (operating at 0.000075-megabyte per second). The strategy was founded upon the assumptions that websites and webpages could operate like printed editions and printed pages or broadcast channels; that consumers and advertisers would use those in the same ways they had used printed periodicals or broadcast; that the previous century’s business models for media would work online; and that, as billions of consumers began shifting their media consumption to online rather than printed editions or broadcast programming, the Mass Media industries would earn revenues equal or greater than they had in the previous century.
More than 30 years of empirical data and financial statements have since overwhelmingly proven that this simplistic strategy has been calamitous for the Mass Media industries. It’s so obsolete that its sheer necrosis is killing those industries. Nevertheless, Mass Media executives persist pursuing it like braindead zombies wobbling their industries into doom.
Don’t join them in the grave. Stop clinging to the past. You mustn’t tie your career and future to so obviously disastrous a strategy. Instead, grasp the remarkable opportunities of the present and future this website examines and details.
If the purpose of your media company is (to profit by) providing news, entertainment, or other information, avoid the titanic mistake made 600 years ago by the monks who copied books by hand. They were outraged by Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable-type printing press and his resulting mass production of Christian Bibles. Laboriously working in their monastic scriptoria , each monk could produce a Bible in one or two years, while Gutenberg’s press could produce hundreds. The monks spent decades trying to compete with the new technology but to no avail. Their huge mistake was shortsightedly persisting that their purpose was to hand-copy Bibles and to not realize that their actual real purpose was to disseminate the Biblical texts. Had they purchased presses and utilized the new technology, they would have advanced their true purpose and thrived.
You now can, too. Learn how here.