The media company is, among other things, a talent scout, and its distribution channel provides a test bed for public opinion. But after a certain point, the author may not need this forum. In the digital age, Michael Crichton could surely make far more money selling his next book direct. Sorry, Knopf.
The distribution of atoms is far more complex than bits and requires the force of an enormous company. Moving bits, by contrast, is far simpler and, in principle, precludes the need for these giant corporations. Almost. It was through The New York Times that I came to know and enjoy the writing of the computer and communications business reporter, John Markoff. Without The New York Times, I would never have known of his work. However, now that I do, it would be far easier for me to have an automatic method to collect any new story Markoff writes and drop it into my personalized newspaper or suggested-reading file. I would probably be willing to pay Markoff the proverbial “two cents” for each of his stories … Once somebody is established, the added value of a distributor is less and less in a digital world.
Maybe the bandwidth should be free, and we buy movies, long-distance health monitoring, and documents because of their value, not the channel’s. It would be unconscionable to think of buying toys based on the number of atoms in them. It is time to understand what bits and atoms mean.
Nobody has a clear idea who pays for what on the Internet, but it appears to be free to most users. Even if this changes in the future and some rational economic model is laid on top of the Internet, it may cost a penny or two to distribute a million bits to a million people. It certainly will not cost anything like postage or FedEx rates, which are based on moving atoms.
In the digital world it is not just a matter of copying being easier and copies more faithful. We will see a new kind of fraud, which may not be fraud at all. When I read something on the Internet and, like a clipping from a newspaper, wish to send it to somebody else or to a mailing list of people, this seems harmless. But, with less than a dozen keystrokes, I could redeliver the media to literally thousands of people all over the planet (unlike a newspaper clipping). Clipping bits is very different than clipping atoms.
Media barons of today will be grasping to hold onto their centralized empires tomorrow. I am convinced that by the year 2005 Americans will spend more hours on the Internet (or whatever it is called) than watching network television. The combined forces of technology and human nature will ultimately take a stronger hand in plurality than any laws Congress can invent. But in case I’m wrong in the long term and for the transition period in the short term, the FCC had better find some imaginative scheme to replace industrial-age cross-ownership laws with incentives and guidelines for being digital.
As we go on-line and deliver more and more bits and fewer and fewer atoms, the leverage of owning printing plants will disappear. Even having a dedicated staff of reporters worldwide will lose some of its significance as talented free-lance writers discover an electronic venue directly into your home.
Should it really be unlawful to own a newspaper bit and a television bit in the same place? What if the newspaper bit is an elaboration of the TV bit in a complex, personalized multimedia information system? The consumer stands to benefit from having the bits commingle and the reporting be at various levels of depth and display quality. If current cross-ownership policies remain in existence, isn’t the American citizen being deprived of the richest possible information environment? We are shortchanging ourselves grotesquely if we forbid certain bits to commingle with others.
The entire conception and construction of the newspaper is digital, from beginning to end, until the very last step, when ink is squeezed onto dead trees. This is the step when bits becomes atoms. Now imagine that the last step does not happen in a printing plant, but that the bits are delivered to you as bits. You may elect to print them … or you may prefer to download them into your laptop, palmtop, or someday into your perfectly flexible, one-hundredth-of-an-inch-think, full-color, massively high-resolution, large-format, waterproof display (which happens to look exactly like a sheet of paper and small like one, too, if that’s what turns you on). While there are many ways to get you the bits, one is surely broadcast. The television broadcaster can send you newspaper bits.
Take the weather as an example. Instead of broadcasting the weatherman and his proverbial maps and chart, think of sending a computer model of the weather. These bits arrive in your computer-TV and then you, at the receiving end, implicitly or explicitly use local computing intelligence to transform them into a voice report, a printed map, or an animated cartoon with your favorite Disney character. The smart TV set will do this in whatever way you want, maybe even depending on your disposition and mood at the moment. In this example, the broadcaster does not even know what the bits will turn into: video, audio, or print. You decide that. The bits leave the station as bits to be used and transformed in a variety of different ways, personalized by a variety of different computer programs, and archived or not as you see fit.