The future of media

If we want to understand how communications could change in the next 15 years, we must look back over the same period — to a time before the cellphone and the internet. Only then can we appreciate and prepare for the potential revolution that still faces us in the future. Here is a tale from the past and the future that offers a glimpse of what dreams may come.

The year is 1992. I am sitting at a desk in the middle of a cavern of a room in an old building in downtown Johannesburg. It is lined with tables, telephones and XT computer monitors glowing with green type on black backgrounds. Along one wall, newly arrived Apple Mac computers blink their black text on white screens.

This is the newsroom of the Weekly Mail, soon to become the Mail & Guardian, but for now surviving on a non-existent budget, the donations of supporters, and the fiery passion of its journalists.

The atmosphere in the newsroom is tense. We are waiting for news from a team of photographers and reporters who ventured into Alexandra township early that morning. Their mission: to witness, record and analyse the violence that grips the townships. Their work is vital. It will help prove the existence of a Third Force, a covert network of dirty-tricks operatives set up by the security agencies of the apartheid government to destabilise the townships.

Now it is late afternoon, and we have no word from our journalists. I glance apprehensively at the telephone. But then I dismiss it from my thoughts. Phones are more difficult to find in Alex in 1992 than a mainstream newspaper reporter. Eventually the phone does ring. A friendly reporter from a rival newspaper. They’ve just been informed by a news agency that the police have sealed off Alexandria.

The vigil continues into the evening. Finally, at 10pm, the journalists trudge wearily into the newsroom. Their bleak, shell-shocked faces reflect the scenes they have witnessed. There is no back-slapping to mark their safe return — only naked relief. The task of processing film and printing photos, of capturing thoughts and debating the analysis of events, will wait until later. Then will come lengthy fact-checking, and tortuous legal consultations on what can and cannot be reported or concluded. But for now, deadlines pale in significance compared to the safety of journalists.

Fast-forward 15 years.

It is 2007. The newsroom is not wildly more hi-tech than in 1992. The computers look somewhat older. But collecting the news, reporting from the field, capturing images and processing information and photos has changed more dramatically in this period than in any previous 15- or even 30-year period in the history of journalism.

There is not a reporter who is not carrying a cellphone while on assignment. There is barely a photographer who is not using a digital camera. The photo is processed at the moment of conception; sometimes, it is sent wirelessly back to the newsroom moments after the image has been captured.

In many cases, the images and words are provided by ordinary people: passers-by, concerned citizens and involved readers, who never miss an opportunity to capture an image or even video clip of a newsworthy incident or event on their cellphones.

Fact-checking is speeded up hundredfold by the internet — whether through Google, Wikipedia, news archives or a brief email to an expert source.

Perhaps legal consultation hasn’t become any faster — lawyers still use flesh-and-blood brain cells in preference to transistors — but email and “track changes” functions on documents have removed the complexity of reams of to-and-fro faxes, faxes and more faxes.

Now fast-forward another 15 years.

The year is 2022. The newsroom of the Mail & Times no longer exists in a fixed location. This week the editor is at a conference in Cape Town entitled Instant newspapers: Here to Stay?. Her presentation is a case study entitled “Ten years in tele-newspapers”. She spends hours crafting comments to match the video stream that will accompany her presentation. She and her team have already spent days editing the video stream down to a 45-minute sequence, and fine-tuning the video wallpaper with all its embedded links.

The effort is worthwhile. Most of the readers who subscribe to the tele-edition of the M&T also select the editor’s analysis as part of their standard menu. The presentation will be fed live into the tele-paper as the editor presents it. And if the readers like it, they will snip the best comments and clips and restream them to friends or tele-people linked to their digital profiles.

Some may even use the best segments in their Tele-Self — an avatar that is always available to share its owner’s biography, CV, likes, dislikes, views, ideas, preferences and work and social status with anyone who is registered to contact it.

The editor pauses only briefly to wonder why it is still necessary to be physically present at the conference. Then she recalls the previous year’s de-networking cocktail party that followed the day’s proceedings. She had met many new faces that she had previously only known in the tele-sense, but one stood out. Over a few drinks and snacks, she had befriended a veteran vlogger, one of the first South Africans to produce a video log on the old internet back in 2007. Now she regularly touches base with him for his sage advice on issues such as commercial links in her live column and rights immunity provisions for reader inserts in the column. No question about it: she would keep flying down to Cape Town in the M&T air-taxi for these conferences.

Finally, the comments are ready for inclusion in the script. Unlike the editor of the rival Weekender Sun, who is able to do his commentary off the cuff, she still depends on prepared lines. At least that will save her the social and political disaster that befell her rival when his mind went blank on the name of the president — during a live tele-paper feed.

Now she has a little time to Face with her department heads. She speaks the word “team” into her iWrist, selects the names of each of the chief loggers — for news, politics, sports and hi-tech leisure. She says “Presence”, and each of them is connected to the iWrist. With another command, she activates the OpenFace screen on the wall of the hotel room, and with a sweep of her hand transfers the communication from the hand device to the wall.

Each of the colleagues’ faces appears in life-size on the wall, and she knows that each of them can see the rest in the same view if they choose.

Each in turn flips through text, images, audio clips, video clips and matching wallpaper that will make up the next day’s menu. She suggests an additional user-feedback slot in the review of the new Apple iCar. It is sure to generate a lively user debate — after all, who wants that ancient chatterbox Steve Jobs as a holographic passenger in their electric cars? But some diehards still have a religious belief in all things “i”.

Such debates, of course, always mean more users of the tele-paper.

One by one, the chief loggers de-network. Finally, only the head of hi-tech leisure is still linked. The visuals are dealt with, so she switches him back to the iWrist, and heads for the bathroom to continue the chat in the comfort of a hot, organically enriched bath.

Her mind wanders back 15 years, to the time she first joined the M&T’s predecessor, and worked for its first female editor. When it was still a printed newspaper. When she still had to go into the office every day. When she first lay in a bath, with a cellphone in her hand, calling in sick to a disbelieving editor.

Today, with journalists carrying their entire office on their wrist, able to transfer it on to any nearby tele-device or interface for voice, text, graphic or visual instruction, it would be resented if they wanted to come into the office. Who would want to take up valuable desk-rental allocations just for the sake of working in the same room … ?

That third scenario may seem a little too futuristic, but only if you haven’t paid close attention for the past 15 years. In fact, it is far more realistic than the 2007 scenario would have appeared 15 years ago. Most of what is described is already technically possible and in some form of operation.

What makes it terrifying is the idea that, 15 years ago, almost no one was prepared for two telecommunications revolutions that utterly changed the face of media and of most of our lives: the cellphone and the internet. Imagine if two similarly revolutionary technologies were about to emerge in the next two years. The mainstream of media and communications by 2022 would be utterly unrecognisable from anything that we are experimenting with, let alone using, today.

As The Beatles put it exactly 40 years ago in All You Need Is Love: “There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.” That sums up the dilemma of projecting into the future from the present.

But what we know we can expect in media and telecommunications in the next 15 years:

Broadband everywhere, meaning real broadband at several megabits per second, and eventually even gigabits per second, as data becomes a pure commodity;

The data stream is already moving to the core of all telecommunications. In the next 10 to 15 years, it will become a standard platform on which all other forms of content, communication and interaction are formulated and reformulated in order to add value and thus generate revenue;

Seamless transfer from one communications device to the next, depending on where we are and what our preferences are at that moment;

Communications devices tailored to our lifestyles, work requirements and fashion preferences, with phones, media players and data devices masquerading as watches, necklaces and clothing when we wish, and transferring into home, office or leisure appliances when it suits us;

Music will become a rental service, with artists earning revenues based on percentage of songs actually listened to, rather than individually bought. The handheld device, whether phone or music player or combination, will become the primary destination of almost all music purchased digitally. The CD will disappear, and phone art will replace album art;

Music and other content will become intermingled and interfaced, allowing consumers of content to customise it to their preferences on the fly, such as removing irritating images or segments, or altering male voices to female voices, or extending the performance on the fly;

Content mash-ups (today meaning the combination of different online applications into something new) will be as important as the content itself, with the sampling techniques used in music today extended to all forms of content, and creativity associated as much with the creators of the original content as with the creators of the mash-ups — even if they had nothing to do with the content that makes up the mash-ups. This means that media houses will also have to be mash-up houses;

Newspapers will experiment with numerous formats, including plastic paper and digital paper, but ultimately will have to accept that the platform is becoming irrelevant. Rather, it’s the content, the presentation of the content, the integration of content and the reader interaction with content that will dictate format, presentation and delivery. Readers will want to repurpose their media even while they are consuming it;

Citizen journalism and reader commentary will become a core element of media. It will become standard, rather than the exception it is now, for readers to be paid for their input, based on level of advertising with and usage of that input;

While the telecoms revolution of the next 15 years begins with the roll-out of WiMAX amid much hype, it is likely to end with vast indifference to technology. The context will be an overriding focus on what the technology makes possible, rather than what it is. This, in turn, will result in a continued blossoming of innovation made possible by the commoditisation of the data stream.

Finally, that Beatles reference was not arbitrary. All You Need Is Love was written for and performed on the first-ever live global television link, broadcast via satellite to 26 countries and watched by 350-million people on June 25 1967. It was the beginning of a mass-media and telecommunications revolution that is still being played out today, even as countless new technologies compete for the title of “revolutionary”.

Each one feeds into the next, and combine into an evolution of telecommunications that renders our lives unrecognisable from anything that went 40, 30 or even 15 years before. Change, as in all of history, remains the only constant in telecommunications. Be prepared for change, or be overwhelmed by its impact.