The Internet as a public medium continues to defy conventional media analysts because it 
isn't a rationally constructed medium, but part of a much larger, spontaneously evolving 
dynamic in the history of media. We are witnessing a dimensional change in media. Many 
of the traditional key metrics used to measure and operate previous, flatter media do 
not and will not apply to this new media.

The advent of digital media technology in this decade has catalyzed the answer to a 
latent public need. Each individual in society has a basic human need for easier access 
and better control over what, how, and when that individual gets the news, information, 
entertainment, and communications she seeks in order to live her life better. The 
aggregate of these individual needs is a public need. This public need had long remained 
latent because the dimensions of previous media were mainly unable to satisfy it and 
even contained it. Yet, the advent of digital technology, which brings with it virtually 
unlimited media addressability, allows fulfillment of that latent public need. And 
media, above the control of its very operators, are striving to take advantage of that 
addressibility and satisfy that need.

The Internet as medium is neither a fad nor a parallel extension of existing media. It 
is the first manifestation of a dimensional change in media, an entirely new direction. 
This new dimension is difficult to see, even deniable close-up, yet looms indisputably 
when seen in long perspective: The aboriginal dimension of media is one-to-one, 
beginning in conversation and extending through aristocratic or monastic scribes, 
libraries, mail, telegraph, and telephone. The original dimension of media in the 
conventional sense is one-to-many, beginning with social and political oratory, theater, 
town criers, printed broadsheets, newspapers, magazines, cinema, radio, and television. 
Media have always embraced technologies to extend reach, but the basic dimensions of 
media have always been confined by the delivery capabilities of those technologies. The 
inherent limits in the analogue deliveries of telephony, print, and broadcast frustrated 
fullfillment of public needs. The addressibility of digital technology now shatters the 
limits of analogue. It frees media to evolve spontaneously the first, albeit 
rudimentary, many-to-many media of which the Internet and the promise of future 
multiple-way video personal information, communication, and entertainment systems are 
parts. This third dimension of media, the many-to-many, will fundamentally change the 
history and business of media.

The Internet as mass medium has evolved from military and academic technologies to 
satisfy that latent public need for easier access and better control over what, how, and 
when each individual gets the news, information, entertainment, and communications she 
seeks in order to live her life better. It evolved spontaneously. No company invented 
the Internet as a mass service. No telecommunications corporation wired it as a public 
utility. No media company created it as a medium. Madison Avenue didn't market it. The 
dawn of the Internet as medium caught the traditional media and telecommunications 
aristocracies sleeping. Even the major online services were forced to offer Internet 
access by public demand. The individuals who constitute the public are embracing the 
Internet, despite this new medium's still somewhat inaccessible forms, because it 
satisfies their need. It increasingly shifts control over access to content from that 
aristocratic few to the individual many.

In the remaining years of this century, we will see the rise of Personalized Media and 
Personalized Marketing. Personalized media and personalized marketing will dominate the 
21st Century in the way that mass media and mass marketing have dominated the 20th 
Century. The development of digital many-to-many media will give rise to personalized 
media and personalized marketing much in the way that development of one-to-many media 
gave rise to mass media and mass marketing. 

The term many-to-many is most often misunderstood to be a variant of one-to-many media 
in which everyone becomes his own publisher or broadcaster and cacophony results. This 
misinterprets the flow desired within many-to-many media by the public to satisfy 
aggregate individual needs and misplaces its predicate. In one-to-many media, each 
individual receives the same thing as every other individual who uses that medium. In 
many-to-many media, however, each individual will receive exactly what that individual 
wants, tailored to that individual's specific needs. Many-to-many can satisfy an 
individual's needs in ways that traditional one-to-many media, with its uniform content, 
cannot; it can satisfy the aggregate of individual needs in ways that traditional 
one-to-many media, with its uniform content, cannot. It encompasses and extends previous 
media in a new way. It permits an individual's reception not only of one-to-one media 
and one-to-many media, but simultaneous and intelligible reception of as many 
ones-to-one media and ones-to-manys media as that individual so desires.

What this means for you the individual is that ultimately the news, information, 
entertainment, and advertising which you see on a website, EMail, or whatever future 
convergence of television and personal computers occurs, will be different from the ads 
that someone else sees in the same media. The news, data, programming, and ads you see 
will be based on your expressed or recorded preferences and interests. Computerized 
algorithmic programs for preference will search and deliver to you editorial, 
entertainment, and product and service information specific to your interests and 
demographics. Many-to-many is not a Mass Media with Mass Marketing, but a Personalized 
Media with Personalized Marketing.

It has become fashionable in one-to-many media companies to disparage 'intelligent 
agentry' as if such software will forever be exclusionary, isolatory, and thus doom its 
public acceptance. Such statements are like to those of the 1895 stable owners who said 
that automobiles will never operate as reliably as the horse. Future 'intelligent 
agentry' will utilize 'fuzzy' logic, heuristic thinking, and intentionally contain 
overrides that allow reception of appropriate common or serendipitous content. Market 
dynamics will make 'intelligent agentry' operate in this way because none of the media's 
three constituencies will ever permit any total exclusion, isolation, or control:

No individual who uses media wishes to be totally excluded or isolated. Any 'intelligent 
agentry' that delivered only what an individual predesignated risks isolating that 
individual from news of major events (Bosnia, Oklahoma City); from unexpected features 
that individual might find interesting (O.J. Simpson's Bronco drive, what's 'hot' on TV, 
etc.); and from general product and service awareness. Fascination at the unexpected is 
basic to human nature, so no significant group of consumers will ever allow themselves 
absolute control of what they see.

No absolute self-control means there will always roles for editors to tell the public 
what it does not yet know. The same for entertainment. Producers seek to reach 
widespread audiences of interest by the most efficient and economical means. No longer 
do two programs at the same time have to compete for the same viewership. You can watch 
concurrent "Beverly Hills, 90210" and "Dave's World" and "seaQuest 2032" at anytime, if 
you are so inclined. The major differences will be that, while elelctronic publications 
and programs may have release dates, they will not have set delivery or airtimes, and 
the consumer, not publisher or broadcasters, will have explicit control of format, depth 
of information, play, pause, rewind, and printout, as well as general topical control.

Nor has any media ever created yet been unaffected by commercial forces. Advertisers and 
marketers,national, regional, or local, will always need to create product awareness. 
This necessarily will require to some degree an ability to intrude into the individual's 
choices. Such intrusions will be much less intrusive than as in one-to-many media. It 
may be as simple as an advertiser sponsoring free one-to-one communication between 
individuals. It may be the individual using 'intelligent agentry' to search and deliver 
specific product or service information, such as the network making a market between an 
automobile owner and competiting tire shops. Or it might simply be commercial, not 
editorial, information as the individual's information of value. Everyone professes to 
hate ads, except those for things that interest them which on many days becomes 
information more valuable than news.

Thus, individuals' self-interests not to be isolated or excluded, combined with the 
commercial and political forces that want to create awareness or consensus, will cause 
developers of 'intelligent agentry' to develop algorithms that seek not absolute 
matches, but 'fuzzy' and individually heuristics ones.

Many-to-many media can more specifically match individual's interests and needs to 
content than can any one-to-one and one-to-many media. This is particularly important 
for advertisers and marketers. They seek to reach consumers who may be interested in 
their products or services, and to develop continuing relationships with such consumers. 
Digital addressibility more efficiently matches consumers and products or services than 
can one-to-many media. Moreover, it eliminates the waste circulation costs inherent in 
advertising in one-to-many media. There is no need to buy publication or broadcast reach 
in hopes that some of those reached might be interested. Digital many-to-many can 
specifically address a product or service to those consumers who are interested, might 
be interested, or, in its most rudimentary form (one possibly now), perfectly fit the 
demographic the advertiser seeks.  Demographic delivery on demand. History and markets 
seek such efficiencies, as does the pubic who are already seeking it today on the 
Internet. The body of Internet 'intelligent agentry' is growing yet so embryonic as to 
be virtually useless today, so individuals manually exercise their control and 
preferences, using search engines such as Lycos and Yahoo.

  [concluded in posting 2/2]
                                     Copyright (c) 1995
- --------------------------------------------------------
           Vin Crosbie, FreeMark Communications, Inc.
One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza       125 CambridgePark Drive
New York, NY 10017 USA           Cambridge, MA 02140 USA
voice: (212) 207-9290                     (617) 492-6600
fax:   (212) 207-9295               crosbie@freemark.com
                 http://www.freemark.com
- --------------------------------------------------------



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End of online-news-digest V1 #363
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