Off Course-On Target: The Old Medium has become the New Content (Part 1)

With typical prescience and wisdom, Marshal McLuhan once made a profound observation that as our communications evolve, the old medium becomes the new content. I was reminded of this when I was reading a recent article in Fortune magazine “TV is Dying? Long Live TV!”

In a previous entry “Books the NEW old medium”, I observed that whenever a significant innovation comes along, there is a tendency to predict that this new thing will replace the old. You know many of my previous examples, such as how radio was supposed to be replaced by TV based on the logic of “who would want a talking box when you can have talking movies?” We can see that the exact opposite has happened. Radio is stronger than ever as a medium. In fact with such things as radio stations streaming their programming via the Internet and satellite radio from the likes of XM and Sirius, radio is enjoying a genuine resurgence.

More recently, you might have read some opinions that the Internet was going to replace TV. George Gilder, whom I read regularly and who is typically very astute and prescient in his observations, wrote a book in 1992 called “Life After Television” that predicted television’s demise and most people believed he was right. However, as with almost all the previous examples I can think if, exactly the opposite happened!

You may have heard some statistics last year that the amount of time spent watching TV had been exceeded by time spent “on the computer”. Yet as the aforementioned Fortune article noted, today people in North America (all I can find statistics for) are watching MORE plain, boring old TV content than ever! The numbers are indeed staggering. The average US household watches eight hours and 14 minutes of television per day and the average individual watches four hours and 35 minutes. Both of these statistics are the highest ever and they DO NOT include the time spent watching TV on computers!

Geoff Colvin, author of the Fortune article, made an interesting and possibly appropriate comparison to what he calls his “Two-Liter Coke Principle”. Several years ago, the Coca-Cola company apparently was very successful in increasing the overall consumption of their brown beverage by switching from one liter to two liter bottles, so he theorized that “just getting more Coke in front of them increased their consumption. It seems to be the same with TV.”

More and more of us ARE spending more time on the Internet and on the computer, and while predictions that more people would be spending more time on the likes of MySpace and Second Life have proven true, this time is NOT being subtracted from TV viewing time. As Geoff succinctly put it, “We’re more likely to cut back on things we consider less important, like sleep.”

So what’s happening here? My comment, like McLuhan’s, would be that we are confusing the medium with the content. TV is the old medium and as McLuhan predicted, it is transforming into content. Or put another way, the current distinction between a TV and a “computer” is increasingly arbitrary and irrelevant. What we are seeing is a literal explosion of “screens” or more accurately what I typically refer to as “digital surfaces”.

I suspect this “explosion of screens” is yet another example of exponential rates of change. Look around your home, office, vehicle, airplane, mall, highway, etc. Digital surfaces are everywhere and are taking up more and more of the available surface area. They are on your cell phone, your camera, your desk, in the kitchen, on the back seat of the airplane, on billboards on the highway, in every shop window and are starting to show up on mirrors. And I suspect that we are at the inflection point where this exponential curve begins to take off.

There's lots more to say about this topic, so I'll talk more about it next time.

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