The Media In 2014...From Predictions Made In 2004!

One of my favorite short films back in 2004 was one called "Epic 2014".  It was faux documentary that purported to report on the media scene in 2014.  It walks the viewer quickly through the history of the internet from Tim Berners-Lee up to 2004 (when the film was made) and then it begins to "report"/speculate about what the next ten years will hold.

If you haven't ever watched it or haven't watched it in awhile, take 8 minutes right now to take a look:



There is some silly stuff here (like Google-zon) and the video does not really hint at the rise of stuff like Facebook and Twitter (much less Instagram and Tinder...).

But the takeaway is an eerily prescient statement concerning the current state of the internet:

"At its best, edited for the savviest readers, [the internet] is a summary of the world - deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything available ever before.  But at its worst, and for too many,  [the internet] is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational. But [the current state of the internet ] is what we wanted.  It is what we chose."

I don't know of anything that is quite this well done (or this insightful) about the future of the internet over the next 10 years (leave a comment if you do!) but I suspect that much of what we will be looking backwards at will involve new technologies like the one demonstrated in the 2 minute video below from Microsoft:



In case you are curious, the hardware and software capable of doing all this is coming to you next year.

The Biggest News Stories Of The Year Are Not What You Think (GOOD via Neatorama)

If you are a regular reader of this blog...well, thank you!

More importantly, though, you are probably better informed about what is going on in the world than the average Joe or Jane.

While this is a good thing, it is not a universal good. It probably also creates a cognitive blind spot as well. What do I mean? Well, most people think that other people think the same way they do. This applies particularly to what is "important".

For example, I remember coming back to the US after having worked the Balkans issue for a number of years and being totally taken aback by the lack of news on the situation there. It was the most important thing in my life and I did not understand why it was not important to people in the US as well.

To put things into perspective, then, (and, note, I did not say proper perspective...) comes the "Biggest Stories Of The Year" infographic from the online magazine, GOOD (via Neatorama). The screenshot below just gives you a taste of the level of detail embedded in this image (you can either click on the image or go to the site to see the chart in all its full, glorious interactivity-ness).



The data for this chart comes from US media exclusively but it includes a wide variety of sources (Fox News and MSNBC, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, Limbaugh's radio show, Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity and Olbermann's TV shows, etc.).

Check out the relative importance placed on various stories. It is no surprise that the Economic Crisis and Health Care received a lion's share of the time but look at how they dominated print and the air waves. Eyeballing it, I would say that those two topics alone accounted for 40% of the stories. Worth it? Maybe...

Some of the comparisons are even more revealing. Iraq got 3-4 times less coverage than the death of Michael Jackson, Russia got about as much coverage as the White House Party Crashers and Tiger Wood's Adultery was about as important as the Mexican Drug War in the eyes of the press.

This is not, in my mind, the result of some vast international conspiracy of either the left or the right. It represents, I think, what Americans wanted. These media outlets are supported by advertising and advertising is supported by eyeballs and ears. If people aren't reading, watching or listening then these outlets can't survive.

It is, then, a reasonably accurate reflection of what Americans were interested in and, arguably, what they cared about in 2009.

Something worth thinking about in the new year...

COOLINT Part Deux: "The World Through The Eyes Of Editors In Chief" (L'Observatoire Des Medias via Boing Boing)

Check out the application below from L'Observatoire Des Medias (I first saw it on Boing Boing). It shows how different major world papers have elected to cover international news. Click on the red dots and countries get bigger or smaller depending on how they are covered by the various news outlets. For a hi-res version of the map, click on the link to the right of each paper. A few more news sources are available at the link to the L' Observatoire site above.