To: "S. Finer" 
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On Wed, 19 Apr 1995, S. Finer wrote:

> I would be interested in hearing more about the low message to cost ratio 
> paradigm vs the high message to price ratio paradigm.  Could you unpack 
> this notion a bit?  Does it mean moving toward PPU , and away from low 
> price subscription combined with advertising revenue?   
> 

I am brainstorming here at the level of theory more than at immediate 
applications, but I will try to answer your question.  I am thinking more 
of broadcast media than print media, but the framework is still 
transferrable.  "Big media buys", as they care called from the 
advertising and revenue side, depend on a small amount of standardized 
content distributed to a mass of viewers ("users") in a repetitive 
fashion over time.  That is why mass media in the 20th century has become 
financially successful, but at the expense of high information content.  
That is why we have the phenomenon of "sound byte politics", 30-second 
commercials, big retail ads, and what critics call "the dumbing down" of 
media and education.  I am not sure "dumbing down" means that the masses 
are dumb, only that we have to make them dumb to make a buck.  The 
internet-based information industry moves in the opposite direction.  It 
provides rich content at increasingly low cost.  That is a "high message 
to price" ratio.  Now, many critics of the internet are harping on how 
much stupidity and unstructured gabble is to be found out there.  They 
thus conclude that we have to get control of the internet to save us 
cultural elites from the dumb and potentially violent masses.  Read that 
pompous and ridiculous article in the latest New Republic.  

I would say to the critics - suppose you were to listen at one time to 
all the talk shows, telephone calls, and personal conversations of people 
in the world at one time you were also listening to the Gettysbrug 
Address, the average Sunday sermon, and all the lectures of the worlds 
great teachers.  You would draw the same conclusion, because that would 
be the oral analogue to what today we call the internet.  Because there 
were so many "in your face" conversations you overhead, would you make 
the statement that nothing worthy has ever been said in the world, and 
that free speech is dangerous?  Well, that is what the internet critics 
are saying.

A word to journalists: how much do you really believe in free speech?  I 
have been interviewed over the years hundreds of times in the national 
media - including all the big ones - on a few, narrow subjects of which I 
am the qualified academic "expert".  I keep getting interview for one 
simple reason - I am in the New York Times database.  When the Times 
wants to do a story on my subject area, they call me - usually about once 
every 14 months - and I get quoted.  That makes me an instant expert in 
all the mid-country metropolitan media, so my name is picked up in those 
stories.  Then the smaller papers start calling me.  I give the usual 
sound bytes, which I know how to do, and my "expertise" shapes discussion 
for the next year.  I am not really such a great expert.  There are other 
experts, but they don't know how to produce sound bytes for your stories 
and they are n't in the New York Times database.  Once or twice the Times 
asks me to recommend another expert, and they get in the database, and 
they keep getting quoted.  

If you don't think this rather curious method of "content creation" 
depends on a cartelized information system, think again.  I have 
benefitted immensely from it.  But, gee whiz, they are guys out there in 
listserves and who have written articles in journals and published who 
some equally profound things to say about a lot of things.  You guys just 
don't bother with them, because it's not the way you do stories.

The latest issue of Internet magazine, hwoever, describes journalists, 
such as the San Jose Merucry News, who are getting hip with online 
information andlearning how to do real research and produce real content 
with real grass-roots authority.

One of these days I would like to tell the story about how a few New York 
media types in a hurry to come up with new stories were browbeaten by a 
few successful New York PR hookers who worked with a few academic and 
professional media self-promoters to create a dubious "scientific theory" 
that is affecting brutally the lives of thousands of people in the court 
system, and how the sham can't be revealed because they are all too 
embarrassed to admit they were gulled in the first place.  If they did 
things different, and didn't have contempt for the people in middle 
America, this rather obnoxious scandal - let's call it "pressgate" - 
wouldn't have happened.  But now we have the internet...


> On Tue, 18 Apr 1995, RASCHKE wrote:
> 
> > I salute your observation on this one.  As the quality of what goes over 
> > the net increases, people are going to be willing to pay for content, and 
> > to lessen their obsession with surfing, which is really just a form of 
> > market familiarization.  Every retailer knows that to get a new product 
> > into the market mainstream, they have to give a lot of the item away so 
> > that people can try and enjoy it.  After a while, they are willing to 
> > pay, and sometimes at a premium.
> > 
> > The point I keep making, but don't wish to harp on it, is that all 
> > information technologies have a history of driving costs, and pricing, 
> > into the ground.  To try one more analogy, the internet is to information 
> > what discount stores were to retailing...with the exception that a lot of 
> > the itnernet information will always be given away.  
> > 
> > My theory of the "new market" is that if someone can figure out how to 
> > embed quality products into a context of free information, they can 
> > charge significantly for them.  But they need to know how to perform the 
> > packaging.  So far old media culture is obsessed with the paradigm of low 
> > message to price ratio, which worked in a proprietary system.  One must 
> > invent models of high message to price ratio...
> > 
> > > ____________________________________________________
> > > 
> > > ERIC K. MEYER                    meyer@newslink.org 
> > > WWW NewsLink       http://www.newslink.org/newslink/
> > > ____________________________________________________
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> 

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To: "S. Finer" , RASCHKE