From Mass Media to Micro-Culture
The rise of television as the most popular of popular mediums mirrors the way that all media worked in the 20th century; in a broadcast, one-to-many culture, it was the best way to inform, educate, and escape. During the first half of the century, advancements in technology enabled mass communication for the first time in human history. It was complex and expensive to distribute, but it could reach pretty much everyone. By the dawn of the 21st century, that mass communication was being unravelled by the internet, which was inherently many-to-many, and came with much lower distribution costs. This disruption was true for newspapers and magazines, then for music, and now it's coming true for television.
We're rapidly exiting the 20th century era of mass media, and headed towards one driven by personal micro-cultures.
Broadcast networks exist because, originally, a television channel distributed over the air needed to be within antenna's range of its audience to reach them. These local channels aggregated viewers, and ABC, NBC, and CBS aggregated these local affiliates into national networks. This helped fund increasingly bigger budget content, and optimized the ad sales process. The networks' business model was simple: use compelling shows to gather as large an audience as possible, for as much time as possible, and show them as many ads as they'll tolerate. This guaranteed that their content would always be lowest-common-denominator — their shows need to be exciting enough to get you to watch, but bland enough to not offend many people. Advertisers had little idea who was watching, and zero ability to target an audience, other than associating with the right content. We were all just guessing, at programming and at advertising. And that's where things stood for decades.
This changed in the 1980's with the advent of cable and pay TV, making possible business models which segmented particular audiences based on demographics. At the time, it was a huge leap forward in allowing both content creators and advertisers to reach whom they wanted — suddenly you knew where to reach women or nerds or LGBT audiences, and could build a business model for television programming around smaller, more targeted shows for smaller slices of the population. It's replicating the strategy for magazines, but with video. Of course, in terms of how we do things online, it's a joke that cable channels and magazines are "targeted". Programmatic TV and companies like Samba TV are attempting to improve the situation from an advertising perspective, but there's a good chance that the most desired programs and channels won’t support it anytime soon.
And yet, here we are, with television experiencing a second golden age, and yet increasing consumer unrest around how we watch it. Viewing of traditional (or "linear") television is in severe decline, even for strongholds like sports. Pay TV subscriptions have begun a free-fall that they're unlikely to pull out of, as millennials demonstrate they don't care about linear TV, with increasing velocity every year. Why don't they care? Because the internet is rapidly eroding the jobs that TV does — it's definitively no longer the best way to get information or education, and its escapism is finding its way. There are simply too many other options, with the major YouTube MVNs and Twitch now ranking higher than many cable networks in viewers and attention. Even focusing on long-form content, the explosion of new original series is making the problem worse, fracturing attention across platforms and devices.
This explosion of content and choices, along with our modern tools and platforms, is driving a retreat to something more provincial than what we've known in our lifetimes. We're rapidly exiting the era of mass media, and headed towards one driven by personal micro-cultures — we will discover and consume content based not on a program grid or a channel affiliation, but by what people we care about recommend. They might be friends, or professional critics, or that guy we spoke to at a party back in 2013 who really seems to know a lot about science. And the exhaust from our own media consumption will inform those who care about our tastes.
Media has always worked this way, with those around us heavily influencing our preferences. (Remember the water cooler moment?) Before the 20th century, the only concept of mass culture that existed was in print, and, notably, not that many people could read. Along with rapidly increasing literacy, radio and television created an explosion of broadcast, one-to-many business models. For the first time ever, it was possible to broadcast to millions of people at once. This created strong economic incentives toward aggregating those people, which in turn created the mass media of the late 20th century.
But the internet has swung the pendulum back in the other direction, with tools and incentives formed around reaching the right people. This is a shift back toward the localized cultures of the 19th century. Except this time, our social circle is freed from the shackles of time and space, and can include anyone, at any time. It's our cultural family of choice, and it demands new kinds of content, and new kinds of business models.
