Commentary

The Future Of Media: The Internet

Internet

It's anything you want it to be.

In the summer of 1995, during the height of early Internet media hype, my stepfather, Paul Bernick, asked me what all the fuss was about. To illustrate the potential magnitude of the new medium, and to do it in a way that might register at a very personal level, I told him that using technologies that existed at that very moment, I could "instantly beam you from New York to Hong Kong" via the Internet. The Star Trek-like analogy had come to me in a flash, and the truth is it startled me as much as it startled him. But it wasn't science fiction. It was scientific fact.

Scientists had recently developed the means of cloning animals, and in theory, I told my stepfather, I could convert Paul Bernick's DNA into digital code, attach the data packet to an e-mail, and send it to a lab in Hong Kong, where genetic engineers could reproduce him as a clone. Okay, so maybe the clone wouldn't actually be Paul Bernick, but that's a debate for a different kind of magazine article. The point was that the Internet had become a global network for instantly transporting packets of data from one place to another, and that the data people attached to those packets - not the means of distribution - would determine how we define the new medium.

Put text and graphics in those data packets, as my fellow journalists and I were beginning to do back then, and the medium would be defined as "publishing" and "pages," an early Web legacy that exists to this day. Place bits of audio data into those packets and the Internet could be described as radio, music, a giant jukebox or even the future of the recording industry, which is exactly what Napster, Kazaa, Rhapsody and others managed to do. Insert video data files in those packets and the Internet might be seen as television, movies or home videos. And so on. In fact, there is no reason the Internet couldn't be used to carry data packets that could be used to convey smell, taste and even touch across the World Wide Web, nor why it couldn't be used to transport data that could be used to replicate a human being. So, if you will, beam me up, Scotty. Lesson one: The Internet is a human teleportation device.

A few months later, I used a completely different metaphor to demonstrate to another family member, my brother-in-law Roger Lebert, an entirely different World Wide Web feature that was transforming our physical world. It took place after Thanksgiving dinner at my home. Roger also inquired what all the bubblish Internet hype was about. Knowing that Roger was a science-fiction buff, I asked him if there were any rare copies of his favorite authors' works that he hasn't been able to find. He said that he had, in fact, been searching for years for a copy of an obscure, out-of-print Samuel Delany sci-fi book. I asked him to join me in my home office, where I booted up my PC and 9600 bpm modem, and after what would now seem an interminable time, conducted a search on a newly launched book-selling site called amazon.com. Within minutes we found several vintage copies of Delany's book. I subtly bookmarked the page, and after Roger left for the evening, I returned to my office, opened the page, and ordered the book. I executed my first-ever e-commerce purchase, because I had Roger's name for the family Christmas grab bag. The book arrived Christmas Eve morning via Federal Express, and I wrapped it, still inside its amazon.com branded shipping box, and put it under the tree for Christmas morning. Lesson two: The Internet is Santa Claus.

A few months later, a close friend turned the Internet epiphany tables on me. I was lunching with my friend Ed Martin, a TV critic and fellow journalist, when he casually explained how he was fooling around with a new Internet site and was making gads of money doing it. Ed's a pack rat, and as a TV critic had been hording the torrent of press kits journalists receive when networks and studios launch new TV shows. He told me he had begun using this new site, called eBay, to sell some of the press kits, and was surprised how much people were willing to pay for them. The kits - for relatively obscure TV shows such as Sinbad and Horatio Hornblower, a miniseries on USA Network - were fetching $200 to $300, mainly because of their rarity and the fact that the average TV fan didn't have access to such memorabilia. I asked Ed how many similar press kits he had in storage, and he said a few thousand. "Do the math," I blurted. "And quit your day job now." Lesson three: The Internet is a giant swap meet.

There are many personal anecdotes I could use to illustrate other equally surprising epiphanies about the transmorphic nature of the Internet, but I'm sure you get the idea. Instead, I'd like to share a professional anecdote that happened at about the same time. It was a meeting I took with Ira Carlin, the long-time head of media at Madison Avenue giant McCann-Erickson, who had just taken the helm of an interactive spin-off agency, Thunder House. Using what then seemed like dazzling new computer applications - a PowerPoint presentation loaded with full-motion video, sound and vivid graphics - Carlin made the case for why the Internet really isn't a medium at all, but simply an engine for processing whatever data someone wanted to transmit to another user or serve to many users.

"My thinking at the time was that the Internet wasn't a product unto itself, so much as it was a distribution platform for other things," recalls Carlin, who has since retired from the advertising world, but remains an advisor and board member for several promising Internet startups.

In Carlin's mid-1990s vision, the Internet was pretty much anything anyone wanted it to be. And as media became increasingly digital, he predicted, the Internet would become all of those things. And of course, he was right.


From a consumer's point of view, the Internet can be used to read a newspaper, magazine or book; listen to a radio station, album or individual song; view a TV show, movie, or, yes, even pornography.

The Internet's ability to adopt those media formats, and to distribute them quickly, openly, and more often than not, freely, has challenged the media industry's underlying business models, and has forced companies and industries to adapt or die. And that process isn't likely to change anytime soon. In an ironic and surprising way, the long-term economic solution to this change will likely be the same one many observers see as being most challenged by the rapid displacement of traditionally distributed media: advertising.

Carlin also foresaw this back in 1997, and his spiffy PowerPoint presentation included a section illustrating how the Internet would simultaneously disintermediate and reintegrate the entire marketing mix. In Carlin's presentation, the Internet was the hub of a marketing wheel whose spokes included advertising, direct marketing, one-to-one selling, promotion, public relations, and even a 1990s au courant marketing buzz term: CRM, which stood for "customer relationship marketing."

Other influential marketing visionaries saw this, and even as Madison Avenue raced to grapple with the transformative impact the Internet would have on advertising, they saw its potential as being equally significant for all the other means in which a marketer connects its brands and consumers.

In fact, it was about the same time that Carlin was making his Thunder House presentation that Ed Artzt, the then-chairman of the world's biggest marketer, Procter & Gamble, gave a speech at an ad industry conference that sent Madison Avenue's biggest players scurrying to figure out how the Internet would morph into the next big ad medium. After nearly a year of research, task forces, white papers and meetings, an ad hoc ad industry group known as FAST held a summit in New York to present its findings for the future of online advertising. During a press conference following the event, reporters asked Artzt how the Internet would transform the way P&G planned and spent its multibillion advertising budget. Artzt's response was that he saw the Internet more as a CRM tool, a way for P&G to communicate with consumers and gauge their feedback on P&G's products and services. The Internet, he said, was tantamount to a giant customer service line.

Needless to say, the Internet has become that and much, much more, but it shouldn't have been surprising to anyone listening to Artzt's comments in the mid-1990s that, by the end of the first decade of the second millennium, the marketing world would become obsessed with things like "buzz marketing," "viral communications" and "word-of-mouth," and that the biggest agencies and advertisers in the world would be using new analytic tools to listen in on the conversations consumers were having online about their brands.

The most surprising thing about the future of the Internet, in fact, may be how much it was actually established in its past. Almost all of its most significant applications were actually conceived and deployed during the seminal days of the World Wide Web, and everything else has been an iteration powered by greater microprocessing, faster and more ubiquitous broadband spectrum, and the imagination.

Take the current online industry buzzes du jour: social networking and widgets. You'd be hard-pressed to attend an industry conference or read an industry publication where these "new" platforms don't dominate the conversation. But the reality is they were some of the Internet's first and most basic applications.

Facebook and the current onslaught of vertical social networks may be the topic of the moment, but the reality is that social networks are merely part of a progression that began with the earliest online communities. They began as user groups, bulletin boards and discussion groups in online services such as AOL, CompuServe, Delphi and Prodigy, and they evolved into more formalized communities such as GeoCities and The Globe. The success of Facebook and MySpace, in fact, has less to do with their innovation than with their ability to galvanize and collect a large base of users, but people have been hooking up online since the pre-Web days of Vox, and via more recent iterations like Friendster.

Or take widgets: "desktop" applications that are distributed over the Internet. Widgets may be all the rage among big agencies and media content companies, but the reality is they were also among the first significant online applications. Remember PointCast? No? Well, back in the mid-1990s, PointCast was drawing a lot of attention by doing what today's widgets do; allow downloadable news, information, entertainment, and other content to run on a user's computer.

While many of the newest and most popular online applications have been around since the earliest days of the Internet, the power of those applications has been magnified multifold by technology and by the fact that more people are using them.

"People go online to do many things," says early Internet pioneer Esther Dyson. "One of the reasons they go online is to create a presence. With Geo Cities, you had your presence in one place. With Facebook, you are distributing your presence to anyone who is your friend."

Dyson says this extends well beyond the cross-linking aspect of Facebook pages to include widgets and even real-time applications such as Twitter.

"With Twitter, people are distributing their presence incessantly. Personally, I think that is a little obsessive, but what people are really doing is collecting social interactions," she explains. "If we had a biological urge to spread our genes, now people have the means to spread their presence."
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So what's the future of the Internet? Well, technology, regulation, business models will surely be important factors, but if you look at what has really been shaping the Internet - both past and present - it is people. And some day, we may even send one over the Internet.

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