Over the last few years I’ve regularly been cornered by nervous publishers or broadcasters or journalists or filmmakers and asked about how I think computers will affect their various industries. For a long time, most of them were desperately hoping for an answer that translated roughly into “not very much.” (“People like the smell of books, they like popcorn, they like to see programmes at exactly the same moment as their neighbours, they like at least to have lots of articles that they’ve no interest in reading,” etc.) But it’s a hard question to answer because it’s based on a faulty model. It’s like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.
Let’s think about what might happen when magazine publishing is no longer a river in its own right, but is just a current in the digital ocean. Magazines are starting to appear on the Web, but since they are just a number of interconnected pages in a world of interconnected pages, the boundaries between “magazine” and “not-magazine,” or indeed between “magazine A” and “magazine B” are, from the Web browser’s point of view, rather vague. Once we drop the idea of discretely bound and sold sheaves of glossily processed wood pulp from the model, what do we have left? Anything useful?
From the point of view of readers, it’s useful in much the same way that a paper magazine is: it’s a concentration of the sort of stuff they’re interested in, in a form that’s easy to locate, with the added advantage that it will be able to point seamlessly at all kinds of related material in a way that a paper magazine cannot. All well and good.
But what about the magazine publishers? What do they have to sell? What are they going to do now that they don’t have stacks of glossy paper that people are going to want to hand over wads of greenies to acquire? Well, it all depends on what sort of business you think they’re in. Lots of people are not in the business you think they’re in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers. (This is why the BBC has such a schizophrenic time — it’s actually in a different business from all its competitors.) And magazines are very similar: each actual sale across the newsagent’s counter is partly an attempt to defray the ludicrous cost of manufacturing the damn thing, but is also, more significantly, a very solid datum point. The full data set represents the size of the audience the publisher can deliver to its advertisers.
Now, I regard magazine advertising as a big problem. I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text, which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little stream trickling its way through enormous, glaring, billboard-like pages, all of which are clamouring to draw your attention to stuff you don’t want; and the first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the coupons, sachets, packets, CDs, and free Labrador puppies that make them as fat and unwieldy as a grandmother’s scrapbook. And then, when you are interested in buying something, you can’t find any information about it because it was in last month’s issue, which you’ve now thrown away. I bought a new camera last month, and bought loads of camera magazines just to find ads and reviews for the models I was interested in. So I resent about 99 percent of the advertising I see, but occasionally I want it enough to actually buy the stuff. There’s a major mismatch — something is ripe to fall out of the model.
If you browse around an online magazine (HotWired, for instance, springs unbidden to mind), you will find a few discreet little sponsor icons here and there that you choose to click on. You only get to see the proper ad if you’re actually interested in it, and that ad will then lead you directly toward solid, helpful information about the product. It is of course much more valuable for advertisers to reach one interested potential customer than it is to irritate the hell out of ninety-nine others. Furthermore, the advertiser gets astonishingly precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one’s interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one that catches people’s attention will thrive. The advertisers pay the magazine for the opportunity to put links to their ads on popular pages of the magazine and — well, you see the way it works. It is, I am told by people with seriously raised eyebrows, astonishingly effective. The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.
That’s one model of how online magazines work, and it is, of course, absolutely free to readers. There’s another that will probably arrive as soon as it becomes possible to move virtual cash around the Internet, and that will involve readers being billed tiny amounts of money for the opportunity to read popular Web pages. Much less than you would, for instance, regularly spend on your normal newspapers and magazines because you wouldn’t have to be paying for all the trees that have to be pulped, the vans that have to be fueled, and the marketing people whose job it is to tell you how brilliant they are. The reader’s money goes straight to the writer, with a proportion to the publisher of the Web site, and all the wood can stay in the forests, the oil can stay in the ground, and all the marketing people can stay out of the Groucho Club and let decent folk get to the bar.
Why doesn’t all the money go to the writer, I hear you (and indeed myself) asking. Well, maybe it will if he’s happy just to drop his words into the digital ocean in the hope that someone out there will find them. But like any ocean, the digital one has streams and eddies and currents, and publishers will quickly have a role finding good material to draw into those currents where readers will naturally be streaming through looking for stuff, which is more or less what they do at the moment. The difference will lie in the responsiveness of the market, the speed with which those streams will shift and surge, and the way in which power and control will shift to those who are actually contributing something useful rather than just having lunch.
The thing we leave out of the model is, essentially, just a lot of dead wood.
Time Travel
Time travel? I believe there are people regularly travelling back from the future and interfering with our lives on a daily basis. The evidence is all around us. I’m talking about how every time we make an insurance claim we discover that somehow mysteriously the exact thing we’re claiming for is now precisely excluded from our policy.
Turncoat
I’m often asked if I’m not a bit of a turncoat. Twenty years (help!) ago in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I made my reputation making fun of science and technology: depressed robots, uncooperative lifts, doors with ludicrously overdesigned user interfaces (what’s wrong with just pushing them?), and so on. Now I seem to have become one of technology’s chief advocates, as is apparent from my recent series on Radio 4, The Hitehhiker’s Guide to the Future. (I wish we hadn’t ended up with that title, incidentally, but sometimes events have a momentum of their own.)