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art of the medium, they were simply byproducts of a
restricted number of channels, leaving every channel to fight for the
average viewer with their average tastes. The proliferation of TV
channels has eroded the audience for any given show -- the average
program now commands a fraction of the audience it did 10 years ago,
forcing TV stations to find and defend audience niches which will be
attractive to advertisers.
Accompanying this reduction in size is a growing response from
formerly passive consumers. Marketing lore says that if a customer has
a bad expereince, they will tell 9 other people, but that figure badly
needs updating. Armed with nothing more than an email address, a
disgruntled customer who vents to a mailing list can reach hundreds of
people at once; the same person can reach thousands on ivillage or
deja; a post on slashdot or a review on amazon can reach tens of
thousands. Furthermore, the Internet never forgets -- a complaint
made on the phone is gone forever, but a complaint made on the Web is
there forever. With mass media outlets shrinking and the reach of the
individual growing, the one-sided relationship between media and
consumer is over, and it is being replaced with something a lot less
conducive to unquestioning acceptance.
In retrospect, mass media's position in the 20th century was an
anomoly and not an inevitability. There have always been both one-way
and two-way media -- pamphlets vs. letters, stock tickers vs.
telegraphs -- but in 20th century the TV so outstripped the town
square that we came to assume that 'large audience' necessarily meant
'passive audience', even though size and passivity are unrelated.
With the Internet, we have the world's first large, active medium, but
when it got here no one was ready for it, least of all the people who
have learned to rely on the consumer's quiescent attention while the
Lucky Strike boxes tapdance across the screen. Frasier's advertisers
no longer reach 10 million consumers, they reach 10 million other
media outlets, each of whom has the power to amplify or contradict the
advertiser's message in something frighteningly close to real time. In
place of the giant maw are millions of mouths who can all talk
back. There are no more consumers, because in a world where an email
address constitutes a media channel, we are all producers now.
Write clay@shirky.com with questions or comments.
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shirky.com Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet
Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
Shirky: RIP The Consumer, 1900-1999 https://www.shirky.com/writings/consumer.html
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