The end of the "Belle Epoque"

Having just been on holiday, I was able to get my face into some books, which I had already read but its good to go back and reflect. As this is what Tomi and I wrote in 2005

If the last 10 years have caused disruption in your business, the next 10 years will cause much more so. Not driven by a controlled introduction of new technologies, but by a uncontrolled adoption of new, radical, unpredictable and even "unfair" methods by an emerging new element in consumption - the digitally empowered community. Digitalisation and the falling costline of technology has ripped through our business and social fabrics over the last 5 years, across all industries, across all countries, altering our economic and social landscapes forever. Yet what we have witnessed so far is only the beginning of a more profound, seismic shift in the very foundations of how business is conducted. We can imagine and do things which were just not possible a few years ago. Life threatening or life enhancing? This is what this book is about, the Red pill or the Blue pill? Which one are you going to take? The one thing for sure is, the structured order of our familiar industrial age has come to an end.

So Carlota Perez was on the agenda with Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

Along with Stephen Jay Gould The Richness of Life with Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy. The Human Development Sequence and Wikinomics by Don Tapscott

Perez talks about the patterns of technological revolutions how they impact industry, society and culture.

When the economy is shaken by a powerful set of new opportunities with the emergence of the next technological revolution, society is still strongly wedded to the old paradigm and its institutional framework. The world of computers, flexible production and the internet has a different logic and different requirements from those that facilitated the spread of the automobile, synthetic materials, mass production and the highway network. Suddenly in relation to the new technologies, the old habits and regulations become obstacles, the old services and infrastructures are found wanting, the old organisations and institutions inadequate. A new context must be created; a new 'common sense' must emerge and propogate.

And reading Gould, of course we have the concept of Punctuated Equilibrium, which is the idea that evolution is not a steady eddy type of process. The change can be sudden, dramatic and deadly.

Structural or mental inferiority did not drive the dinosaurs to extinction. They were doing well, and showing no sign of ceding domination, right until the extraterrestrial debacle unleashed a set of sudden consequences (as yet to be adequately specified, although the 'nuclear winter' scenario of a cold dark world has beem proposed for the same reasons). Some mammals weathered the storm; no dinosaurs did.

So our old familiar analogue mass media world would have survived were it not for the nuclear winter of the arrival of the 6th and the 7th Mass Media

Perez also belives that every technological cycle has a Belle Epoque, and our mass media certainly had theirs.

from a UK perspective (and I think one can reasonably assume that this is also true for the United States and some of mainland Europe) that Belle Epoque began from the late 50's with the introduction of ITV, Britains first commercial terrestrial channel. Lord Thompson famously said of the UK's ITV, 'ITV was a license to print money.'

The BBC was expansionist, bringing BBC 2 into existence accompanied with critical acclaim and the final part of the sequence was the launch of Channel 4 in the early 80's. We all ate Mars Bars, we all knew the Martini ads, or the Tango ads, or the Levi's ads. In the US news anchor man Walter Cronkite used to finish his nightly new bulletin with "And that's the way it is." A far cry from VNR's, – Citizen Journalism and blogs

It was the glory days of Media and Advertising thriving in a limited media universe. It was whe world of the "long lunch," and Ferrari's for everybody. Money was no object to the point where UK advertising agency Saatchi and Saachti in all their pomp at one point seriously considered buying on the UK's 4 clearing banks. Perez points out that the eco-systems created by technology at these points are running at their optimum, economically and organisationally.

Todays, debacle of the BBC losing its most precious asset - trust underscores a much bigger crisis in broadcast media and media in general. Apparently there is a report coming out on ITV in the Autumn which many in the industry believe is as damaging as the Ofcom report on the BBC.

What this shows is a struggle for ratings, for cashflow etc., Gould says there are 4 controlling biases of Western thought – Progressivism, Determinism, Gradualism and Adpationism. These have combined to "construct a view of human evolution congenial to our hopes and expectations."

I think this is true of the media too, and it certainly echoes with the views of Perez. Media ecologies evolve to a point beyond which they cannot innovate any longer, and the evidence is out there that today this is the case.

In many ways these findings bring into focus the fact that revolutions are always bloody, just look at the Industrial Revolution. And of course there is much being done by companies to grapple with the digital revolution. It was Lord Currie of Ofcom who said at a Royal Television Society event.

The rapid growth of first multi-channel, then digital, then PVRs and soon higher-speed broadband are simply the pre-tremors of the real volcanic eruption that technology is about to unleash. At the risk of being over-dramatic I would say that most traditional television broadcasters are today standing about the equivalent of one mile from Mount St Helens. When it blows, frankly, that will be too close and it will be too late to run.

And of course then companies try to stop the process of change by trying to regulate their way out of the process and here and here and of course Lawrence Lessig as contributed enormously to this area of debate and research. Not the only one I might add.

And so having gone through the first surge of a technological revolution, and arriving at a point of installation of technologies that are now interlocking, we arrive at deployment.

At this point financial capital according to Perez starts to invest in the new technologies that are now creating new industries, products and services. Which means we are decoupling from our past. Indeed Institutional investors questioned whether they should be investing in ITV, the company that once boasted that it was a company with a license to print money.

And with that comes a new ecology, new business models, and a new socio-economic paradigm. In this instance its the networked world as described by us at CDB, by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks, by Don Tapscott in Wikinomics, Howard Rheingold at SmartMobs – Danah Boyd – Jeff Jarvis and Henry Jenkins author of Convergence Culture

As Perez describes

Such massive economic transformations involve complex processes of social assimilation. That encompass radical changes in the patterns of production, organisation, management, communication, transportation, and consumption, leading ultimately to a different 'way of life'. Thus each surge requires massive amounts of effort, investment and learning, both individually and socially.

So its adieu to the Belle Epoque of the mass media, but, companies do die as people do, gasping for every last ray of light. So we shall see more headlines about Trust and the media, declining advertising revenues in traditional media, ineffective interuptive communications, failing traditional business models, fights over copyright infringment as the nuclear winter falls over the traditional mass media.

Perez says that the socio-institutional framework adapts to each paradigm and, in turn shapes the preferred direction in which the technological potential will be deployed and how its fruits will be distributed. Read revenue sharing here

Humans are a "We Species" and I often argue that we are directing this revolution towards a "We Media" that certainly implies new market structures, new business models that redefine the media and the world we live in. Markets will form around mass niche communities of interest as geography becomes obsolete.

People will embrace what they create and will increasingly reject one way communications and media.

In the power of the network. Dave Cushman writes

In the process of one blogger linking to the work of another, new value emerges, for example:

1). Two-way flows of information.
2). The creation of trust, validation and reputation
3). Decentralised, self-forming adhoc communities of interest
4). Zero hierarchy or silo restrictions.

It is the world of hot media, not cold media, a new ecology with new rules.

when will its Belle Epoque arrive. As yet we just don't know. But Pandora's Box has been opened

Comments

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Thanks for an essay that gives lots to think about, both directly, and by stimulating new directions of thought. Once again, great stuff!

Sarah

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Sarah,

A pleasure.

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