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Me, Me Media

Whether it's TV or radio, news or entertainment, the iRevolution gives power to the people.

By Warren Berger
From Reader's Digest

The "Pod People"

Terry Wolfisch Cole may seem like an ordinary 40-year-old mom and Girl Scout troop leader, but her small-town Connecticut neighbors know the truth: She's one of the "Pod People." At the supermarket she wanders the aisles in a self-contained bubble, thanks to her iPod digital music player. Through those little white ear buds, Wolfisch Cole listens to a playlist mixed by her favorite disc jockey -- herself. "Deejay Terry" knows precisely which upbeat songs can keep her feet shuffling ahead during the dreary experience of shopping. "I try not to sing out loud, and I take the earphones off when I get to the deli counter or cash register," Wolfisch Cole says, but otherwise, she's sealed off in her own listening booth, signaling "do not disturb" to the outside world.

At home, when the kids are tucked away, Wolfisch Cole often escapes to another solo media pod -- but in this one, she's transmitting instead of just receiving. On her computer web log, or "blog," she types an online journal chronicling daily news of her life (recipes, family updates, or "whatever floats my boat"), then shares it all with the Web. She has attracted a faithful audience who, she says, "seem to actually want to read that my kids threw up on the floor today. Who'd have thunk it?"

Wolfisch Cole -- who also gets her daily news customized off the Internet and whose digital video recorder (DVR) scans through the television wasteland to find and record shows that suit her tastes -- is part of a new breed of people who are filtering, shaping and even creating media for themselves. They are increasingly turning their backs on the established system of mass media that has provided news and entertainment for the past half-century. They've joined the exploding "iMedia" revolution, putting the power of media in the hands of ordinary people.

The tools of the movement consist of a bubbling stew of new technologies that include iPods, blogs, podcasts, DVRs, customized online newspapers, and satellite radio. All are being embraced by a public increasingly hungry for media control. A new study by Arbitron has found that 27 million Americans now own one or more on-demand media devices such as an iPod or a DVR. And it's not just techies or teenage nerds joining the fray: Arbitron's senior vice president Bill Rose says the study shows that the appeal of do-it-yourself media is already crossing demographic lines and will continue to spread.

Devotees of iMedia run the gamut from the 89-year-old New York grandmother, known as Bubby, who has taken up blogging to share her worldly advice (her motto: "Everything you are going through, I already did"), to 11-year-old Dylan Verdi of Texas, who has started broadcasting her own homemade TV show or "vlog," for video web log, covering topics that include breaking news on her braces. In between are countless iMedia enthusiasts like Rogier van Bakel, 44, of Maine, who blogs at night, reads a Web-customized news page in the morning, travels with his fully loaded iPod and comes home to watch whatever the DVR has chosen for him. Everything is filtered according to his interests, which include libertarianism, songs by the art-rock band Kaiser Chiefs, and anything involving the Belgian cartoon character Tintin.

If the old media model was broadcasting, this new phenomenon might be called ego-casting, says Christine Rosen, a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a research institute. The term fits, she says, because the trend is all about me-me-media -- "the idea is to get exactly what you want, when and where you want it."

Rosen and others trace the beginnings of the iMedia revolution to the invention of the TV remote, which marked the first subtle shift of media control away from broadcasters and into the hands of the average couch potato. It enabled viewers to vote with their thumbs -- making it easier to abandon dull programs and avoid commercials. With the proliferation of cable TV channels in the late 1980s followed by the mid-1990s arrival of the Internet, controlling media input wasn't just a luxury. "Control has become a necessity," says Bill Rose. "Without it, there's no way to sort through all the options that are becoming available."


Real Simple Syndication

Those options swelled in the past three years as a kind of perfect storm of new personalized media technologies has come together. First, Apple's iPod burst on the scene and quickly attracted 10 million customers (by one estimate, iPods are selling at a rate of 40 per minute). The digital music players allow users to download music off the Web, song by song, to create their own music mixes, bypassing radio deejays and record stores. Podcasts arrived in 2004, enabling people to download entire radio programs or create their own radio shows. The same year, blogs exploded as a mainstream phenomenon (there are 10 million out there now), allowing almost anyone to become a pundit. The development of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) made it easier for bloggers and readers to keep tabs on one another. RSS also helps make possible the creation of personalized online newspapers -- "the Daily Me," as dubbed by technologist Nicholas Negroponte -- made up of headlines, article summaries and links to content that matches one's precise interests.

Television and radio have also been transformed by technology. DVRs provide more control to viewers, as does video-on-demand. And the fastest-growing segment of radio is satellite, offering choices that appeal to even the narrowest tastes. (The Sirius satellite radio system has an Elvis channel.)

All of these new developments notwithstanding, there's more to the iMedia craze than gadgets, gizmos and additional channels. Observers say the trend has been fueled by restless creativity among those people formerly known as the audience -- who will no longer sit still for mass-produced, one-size-fits-all media. Chicago insurance analyst Andrew James, 30, says he's had it with "stupid banter from idiots on the radio -- my iPod takes care of that." Jayme Maultasch, 26, a New York ad executive, gets his news from blog feeds because, he says, "bloggers are free to tell it the way it is, while the mainstream media has become too packaged, too cautious."

Moreover, the iMedia generation isn't content to be on the receiving end; they want to have a voice in the new media. "Consumers now have more power, access and choice," says Robert A. Iger, president and COO of Disney. Echoes Brian Collins, an executive creative director at the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency: "The new technology is unleashing all of this pent-up creativity. In the past, only people with vast resources could create media. Now those barriers are coming down."

When that happens, the iMedia age will be fully upon us, and it will be Utopia -- to some people. Grass-roots media activists like Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, envisions a world in which citizen journalists will be able to report on their local communities in a way that the mass-market media does not. Jeff Jarvis, who runs the popular blog Buzzmachine.com, says that people empowered by iMedia will challenge the mainstream media and present their own version of events. "Basically, it means more voices will be heard, because more people will own the broadcast tower," he says. "And in a democracy, that's a good thing."

Well, maybe. Some worry that the iMedia society now forming may be fractious, self-absorbed and narrow-minded. One of the problems with personalized media, says University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein, is that it creates what he calls "the echo chamber effect." When you can create and shape your own media experience, "you tend to exclude topics and viewpoints you wish to ignore. That just reinforces what you've always believed, and it's a recipe for extremism." It also makes it hard for a democracy to function, Sunstein says: "Without shared experiences, we're going to have a hard time understanding one another and agreeing on things." The futurist Watts Wacker, co-author of The Visionary's Handbook, foresees a similar scenario. "In the personalized media world, we'll return to tribalism," he says. "The tribe will consist of people who believe what you believe, and who connect with you through shared tribal media, like blogs."


Media Free-for-All

Jarvis doesn't fret over the loss of shared media experiences. "Was it really so grand that we all watched 'Dallas' at the same time?" he asks. And he sees blogs bringing together diverse viewpoints: "On my blog, I link to people I disagree with." But Sunstein maintains that often when bloggers do link to opposing viewpoints, "they do so in order to ridicule or cast contempt upon the other side." (Anyone who witnessed the hostile crossfire between blogs during the 2004 Presidential campaign can attest to this.)

Another concern associated with the iMedia revolution is that as it barrels past the established media gatekeepers -- broadcasters, editors -- it may create a media free-for-all. Rights issues could prove thorny: If you create a podcast, can you use someone else's music? Not if he has a good lawyer, says Sam Whitmore, editor of Sam Whitmore's Media Survey online newsletter. "You can bet Disney would hammer someone who tried to use 'The Mickey Mouse Club' theme. I predict we'll see lawsuits, and somebody's going to lose his home over something he podcasts." There's also the privacy matter: If you shoot homemade news from the community center, is it okay to transmit your fellow townsfolk's images over the Internet? "We may be entering a world where there's no such thing as being off-camera," says Whitmore. "That's exciting to some and scary to others."

Meanwhile, who will become the next media gatekeepers? One scenario circulating via a film on the Internet prognosticates that the Big Media Boss of the future will be an entity called Googlezon (a merger of Google and Amazon), which will replace the press by funneling personalized news and information directly to customers. (Google web products director Marissa Mayer says: "I don't think we will become the gatekeepers; I think there'll be democratization of information.") Certainly, power will reside with companies that can manage and sort vast amounts of information and then redirect it to you, based on your preferences. Amazon already does this, using algorithms to create recommendations of which book you should buy next, based on what you've read before. News, entertainment, even advertising will increasingly be directed at individuals, based on their previous consumption or behavior. Says Bob Lutz, chief technology officer at Nielsen Media Research: "Your smart TV will know who's watching, and will decide which ads should be shown."

That strikes some as slightly Big Brotherish. "It raises issues about who gets to define who we are," says Joseph Turow, a professor with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "I may not want someone making assumptions about me and deciding what I should be shown on my TV." Turow also worries that this kind of targeting could be used to discriminate, offering differing prices or services to people based on the desirability of their "media profile."

Perhaps the biggest worry is that too much media will cut us off from the life around us. People spend ten hours a day with media, according to a study by the media research company Veronis Suhler Stevenson. And time spent with solitary forms of media is that much less time spent with other human beings. Michael Bull, a University of Sussex professor who specializes in studying the behavior of iPod users (earning him the moniker Professor iPod), says that Pod People tend to live in a state he calls "absent presence -- you're there, but you're not really there."

Author Douglas Rushkoff posits that media yields a more productive and enjoyable experience when it "brings people together -- whether in the viewing itself or at the water cooler the next day." Since the iMedia experience fails to offer that, Rushkoff thinks people may gradually discover it's not as much fun as it's cracked up to be.

But few believe the movement is going to slow down. And even critics of iMedia say there are benefits to be reaped -- convenience, choice, information, an opportunity to be heard -- if we can manage the problems. Sunstein recommends that iMedia users make a conscious effort to expose themselves to contrary ideas and voices -- to break out of the bubble every once in a while. And Professor iPod has this practical suggestion: Now and again, try taking those buds out of your ears.

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Some ways to start your own iMedia revolution:
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