US International Media begins the year with much optimism and a clear understanding of the challenges the year is likely to bring. Many economic forecasters failed to grasp the strength of the financial turmoil roiling practically all industries last year, including advertising. The company, and its predecessor Western International Media Corporation, have successfully navigated the joyful peaks and dire valleys of rough business cycles before. As the saying goes, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Last year, the company launched The USIM Gazette®, an online journal dedicated to discussing all facets of the fascinating world of media, and to presenting our take on an industry that owes so much to USIM’s founder, Dennis Holt. As many of our readers know, Dennis conceptualized a revolutionary business model for the advertising industry about 45 years ago. Dennis believed that media could be purchased as a service that would only work with advertising agencies or in-house agencies, acting as an intermediary between media’s consumers and distributors. Dennis unbundled media and captured the value generated by specific services in the media management process. He recognized that providing advertising agencies (and consequently their clients) with a volume buyer that could aggregate their money and manage their media planning and buying activities would create economies of scale that in turn would translate into better deals for them from the media. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
So what is this media thing that we are so intensively focused on, and whose management of is USIM’s raison d’etre? Various intangibles (quality, art, etc.) have been described with the catchphrase, “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it.” Modern media is like that. Consider the different flavors “mediathink” comes in, as reflected by the extensive phraseology that surrounds the word media: media relations, media bias, media censorship, media literacy, media ecology, media access, media convergence, media psychology, media criticism, media smarts, media art, media studies, media education, media theory, media imperialism, media advocacy, media speed, media empowerment, media monitoring, media integration, media technology, media concentration, and so on. Many of these adjectival phrases show how media redefines so many other areas of political, social and artistic endeavor. And don’t forget the word media’s use as the thing modified, as illustrated by expressions like social media, public media, digital mixed media, new media, civic media, liberal media, conservative media, mass media, streaming media and alternative media. With so many ways that media can be “hyperlinked” to other sociopolitical, economic, and artistic causes, finding a simple definition of media is not easy.
Surely, there is the dictionary definition of the word media, but the discussion here is really about something larger than that. The question is less about what media is and more about what media does. For instance, I recently read in an article somewhere that Google is a media company, just like, say, Time Warner. Considering that Google’s primary product is its popular Internet search engine, clearly, the term media in that article had been broadened to include traditionally non-media technologies. I think of the Internet as a medium, not media, and all of the Internet’s components as artifacts (tools) enabling the user to surf an electronic matrix of connections. Google is the provider of an indexing service that finds content in computer databases that are networked together. The Internet has bi-directional information exchange capabilities, that is, it is a duplex (allowing communication in two directions at a time) communication technology. Television has mono-directional content delivery; it is a simplex (allowing communication in only one direction at a time) communication technology.
To me, the difference between the Internet and television is the same thing as appreciating the difference between a computer and a television set, which may have overlapping functionalities (you can watch TV on your computer, for example), but divergent cultural impacts. How so? Television creates a global mecca, accessed through the senses. You experience television. You do not experience the Internet, meaning that there are no “parafunctional” dimensions of online usage that are personally, emotionally, culturally, socially and spiritually transformative. The Internet engages users differently than television does, and we describe the activity in a way that reflects that difference. That is to say, people use the Internet; people watch television. The Internet can inform you, TV can change you.
To assert that Google is a media company is to look at their indexing service and to see the management support system that is necessary for its operation as media. The famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan warned us over 40 years ago that content alone does not a media make. Indeed, McLuhan’s best known media work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, theorizes that a medium affects the society where it exists not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. That ideology is encapsulated in the celebrated extract, “the medium is the message.”
Unlike computers, television is both a medium and media. It stimulates our senses with its content (TV shows, movies, sports, commercials, news, etc.) and it influences who and what we are. The World Wide Web’s content (text, graphics, audio, video, games, websites, and email) provides us with a technology for information exchange.
Speaking of information exchange, the February 2009 edition of The USIM Gazette® features a series of interesting articles for your consumption. I won’t spoil the fun for you by elaborating on them, so suffice it to say that this is one of the Gazette’s best issues. Take a chance; you’ll enjoy the read. As that old baseball proverb says, you can’t steal second base if you always keep your foot on first base.
Darrell Woody
Editor-Digital Communications