18 Jan 08

On 15 January Anthony Lilley, News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media gave the first lecture from his Twenty questions for the future of the media series. The lecture, entitled, Who Controls the Stories? examined the impact of technology and the rise of interactive media.

Professor Lilley argued that small, elite groups will no longer control the media - the technology needed to spread stories is no longer so expensive and complex that it was limited to a small elite: ‘The network is the organising principle of our age,’ he declared, ‘and yet thinking about it hurts your head in the same way as thinking about relativity. The world of ideas and culture is undergoing a return to openness and complexity on an unprecedented scale. It’s not that networks are new, it’s the scale the makes them different.

‘We’re going from an age of social storytelling back to an age of social stereotyping, with the age of mass media in between.’ Anthony argued that the dominance of mass media would prove to be historic the exception rather than the rule in how culture is built and maintained. He argued that the mass media would still have a role but would lose its primacy.

‘The revolution has already happened. What we need to do now is to get to grips with the consequences and how we make the key architectural decisions. Our technology, as so often before, has outrun our ability to adapt our society and institutions to deal with it.’

Professor Lilley highlighted the changes delivered by the new business model pioneered by internet search engines: ‘By concentrating on what the individual actually wants, or will in fact tolerate, which is unlikely to be an attention tax, otherwise known as a TV ad break, the electronic network is turning our relationship with each other, and therefore with companies inside out.’

Anthony argued that media companies are in danger of fighting the last war – they are sticking to a business model based on scarcity had misunderstood what the rare commodity actually is in today’s media market – information is no longer scarce, ‘The big problem is not distribution but obscurity.’ He argued that companies would need to capture attention by harnessing ‘The Novelty of the New and the Immediacy of the Now.’

Finally Anthony asked: ‘And what of us?' He concluded that ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ now have ultimate control and are consuming cultural ideas on a ‘mind bendingly vast scale.’

Anthony Lilley has set up the Twenty Twenty Blog to enable further contribution to the debate.