*One has to wonder how a magazine that sells news about advertising stays alive to publish this article, when news is dying from lack of advertising revenue.
*I'm believing this "chaos scenario," but I'm also wondering if "chaos" is the front porch of a "long emergency" and "new dark age." Of course – if you were entering a "long emergency," and there was nobody left to tell you about that reality except for James Howard Kunstler and his noncommercial folksinger guitar, would that
*be* an emergency at all? Maybe you'd just be functionally illiterate and dwelling in your favela, like the usual condition of most human beings outside hyperactive market capitalism.
Fascinating to contemplate this new media reality. I could go on about it all day. Tremendous topic. I wonder if anybody will ever again pay me to write about such things.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=135440
'Chaos Scenario' Author Bob Garfield Watches as His Worst Predictions Wreak Havoc on Media and Marketing Worlds
By Bob Garfield
Published: March 23, 2009
The New York Times. TV Guide. Clear Channel. NBC, Boxee, Yahoo.
They tell the story. There is no longer a need to warn of a gathering Chaos Scenario, in which the yin of media and yang of marketing fly apart, symbiotic no more. There is no need to seed doubt about the internet's prospects as an advertising medium, nor otherwise be a prophet of doom.
Chicken Little, don your hardhat. Nudged by recession, doom has arrived.
The toll will be so vast – and the institutions of media and marketing are so central to our economy, our culture, our democracy and our very selves – that it's easy to fantasize about some miraculous preserver of "reach" dangling just out of reach. We need "mass," so mass, therefore, must survive. Alas, economies are unsentimental and denial unproductive. The post-advertising age is under way. (((Pretty good stuff here, eh? Dang!)))
This isn't about the end of commerce or the end of marketing or news or entertainment. All of the above are finding new expressions online, and in time will flourish thanks to the very digital revolution that is now ravaging them. The future is bright. (((I wonder why he says that. Hasn't it already been richly and repeatedly proven that digital media collapse much more quickly, and more repeatedly, than analog media ever did?There's no law of physics that says "chaos" needs to somehow freeze out into "bright futureness." Chaos is chaos.)))
But the present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition – or any transition at all – from mass media and marketing to micro media and marketing are absurd. (((You heard it here first: "hope are absurd." Because the advertisers were paying for all those grammarians and proofreaders.)))
The sky is falling, the frog in the pot has come to a boil and, oh yeah, we are, most of us, exquisitely, irretrievably (((yes he is cursing in public, but after this part it gets really interesting. You look at the list of victims he recites, and it looks like the only potential survivor in the analog OR digital realm will be Craigslist. Why? because it's not a business. Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook... no money in their business. There's no way to get any money, and there's never gonna be any money. "Publishing" is no longer a business at all. And "social media" is a doomed attempt to turn civil society into a "business." Information wanted to be free and now it's worthless.)))
(((Or rather, crowds of people watching information haver become inherently nonmonetizable.)))
(((Come back Singularity theorists, all is forgiven!)))
*Here Mr Garfield is answering my earlier rhetorical question about the health of a mag about advertising in a world with no advertising.
"Ad Age, no less than any other media organization, is being buffeted by the twin storms of recession and business-model disruption. Just this week, we shuttered our Washington bureau, laid off a correspondent, a video producer and sales-side employees and slashed costs across our operation. AdReview has no space because we haven't the advertising this week to underwrite it.
"Happily, Ad Age more than most media organizations, is making money online, finding revenue streams and adapting to the new-world order. ((("New World Chaos."))) The irony is, however, that those new revenue streams for Advertising Age have nothing to do with advertising.
"Because they can no longer sustain one another."
(((Okay, maybe this explains why my Twitter crowd is so full of guys who call themselves
"marketers." They've got no other place to go now? You wonder why they would want to listen to some guy whose job title was "author." And more ominous yet, "journalist.")))
(((We can chaotically tweet our heads off but how do we "sustain one another"?
Maybe the simplest answer is that somebody drafts us to go build Greenhouse dikes.
Hey, it's a living. Don your hard hat, Chicken Little.)))
"Online video is killing the video star." Enjoy your five minutes, "online video."
http://www.unc.edu/courses/2007spring/jomc/170/001/Chaos2.pdf
*Nice Garfield interview here. "The patient has died."
