You’ve heard every single social media/web 2.0 expert/pundit/blabbermouth/evangelist repeat it ad naseum:

Companies in this new world must be honest and transparent with their publics or face the wrath of their consumers. 

In this case though, the “wrath” might just be mere annoyance. 

Apple said that the reason they were pulling out of MacWorld is because they were scaling back on conferences. The direct quote from their initial release is: “Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.” 

Speculation about the ‘real reason’ Apple had pulled out was because of the rumours swirling around CEO Steve Job’s health, and yet today, Jobs sent out an open letter to the Apple Community.

Dear Apple Community,

For the first time in a decade, I’m getting to spend the holiday season with my family, rather than intensely preparing for a Macworld keynote.

Unfortunately, my decision to have Phil deliver the Macworld keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed. [source]

Apple now claims that it was a political decision not to have Jobs to deliver the keynote. All of which means that yet again, Apple isn’t being completely honest and upfront about Jobs’ health. 

What’s up with Steve, how he’s feeling, or why that even matters is of no consequence to me. Apple will be fine, with or without Jobs at the helm.

What’s bugging me about this is that the company couldn’t, or didn’t anticipate their community’s response to the other guy giving the MacWorld Keynote, when it’s always been up to Jobs, and then they pulled out of MacWorld all together after this year? And they didn’t anticipate that this would cause any kerfuffle at all? That the tech reporters, Apple reporters and pundits and the entire fanatical Apple community wouldn’t put all of this together and wonder what was really up?

Apple has built a large, loyal fanbase. They’ve created their own little cult, and have had years and years to get to know this group, to understand how they internalize information and repeat it, and yet, they’re still stumbling, the way they always have, over some pretty basic tenets. 

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

What is Media?

The world medium is almost gone. Whether singular or plural, it’s almost always media these days. In a sense, everything is media. Media is the environment we live in.

The definition of the word changes as the world around us changes. The medium is both the message and the medium itself.

Advertisers are no longer competing for your attention. they claim to be, but they’re not. They’re competing to rescue you from your inattention.

(Sidenote: Eric McLuhan doesn’t have a computer! He doesn’t believe in getting too close to them - he thinks you lose your ability to study them)

Every new medium reconstrues the audience. This provides them with a totally new way to imagine things.

The global village is another term that gets bandied about too often. The global village is a very uncomfortable place. Like any small village, there’s no privacy, everyone is interested in everything that everyone else is doing is not and there’s no way to retreat. Just because the people are scattered around the world doesn’t mean anything.

Since television, the global village has been replaced by something called the global theatre. It truly has turned the world into a stage, and means that people are no longer looking for a job they’re now looking for a role. We’re always being observed, and that means that the idea of private identity is now useless and is an encumbrance.

Because of things like Facebook and other social networks, you’ve expanded your network and an extension of your “stage”. Your social network is your audience and gives you your identity, your sense of belonging, and wholeness. The global theatre never ends - you’re always on. The curtain never goes down.

No matter where you are on the internet, you’re everywhere. Your body may be in one place, but YOU are everywhere at once. There and fully functional as a intelligent, sentient being. The only thing you can’t do are physical, tangible things. Most people don’t realize that this is happening - it’s unconscious, and that’s “where all the action is” says Dr. McLuhan.

We’ve moved out of the physical world and into the metaphysical world. You are no longer constrained by your body and through the net, you can do anything, be anyone, go anywhere. It’s almost totally beyond your control because that’s the nature of participation and interaction.

Media is only definable by metaphysical terms. Electronically, there’s no movement of the message… the message is with you everywhere.

The global village is full of gossip - if it arrives to you as it occurs, then it’s gossip, or you’re participating in it, in which case you’re a player in the global theatre. It puts you either directly beside or in what’s happening around the world in seconds. There is no separation between action and reaction anymore.

Where does it all go from here? what is the next evolution of media?

they no longer asked what happened on the news. they now ask how did that feel? the objective data is very small. They’re relying on the feeling, the interaction, the perception and the experience. The thrust of the report has gone from the data and to the feeling. The experience, the effect and the interaction. That doesn’t engage people anymore.

This has been a very academic and deep subject, however, it’s been very interesting. This is very much something I think I need to mull over some more… as with the Chris Anderson event, images will come later tonight.

Final note: copyright is over. It’s gone. It started to disappear with the advent of xerox. Once you start publishing anything on the internet, anyone can use it, and copyright is now meaningless.

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine

is the Keynote speaker this morning at Vidfest 2008. Chris is speaking about how 0.00 is the future of business.

The Future of Free.

The Internet is the only place that there is a zero margin cost of distribution. Free is entirely different than any other cost. Lowers the barrier of entry, increases waste and there’s an explosion of creativity.

What are the economics of Free? What are the economics of abundance? Chris is writing a book about this very question.

Newspapers aren’t selling newspapers, they’re selling audiences to advertisers. The media business is essentially free. Radio is free to air. TV is free to air. The act of you writing a check for the magazine is a act of interest so that the magazine can prove to their advertisers that they have a committed audience. The cost of a magazine subscription is not at all based in any sort of economic policy at all.

When things get too cheap to meter (like electricity, as they thought in the 50s), they are virtually free.

We need to put technology in te hands of the world so they can tell us what it’s for. The first resource that is so cheap that it’s essentially free is computing power.

The second one that is so cheap it’s essentially free is storage. We need to find a way to waste storage. Chris’s kids have a computer with a terabyte of storage. His nine year old has twice as much storage as his huge multi-million dollar company.

Bandwidth is the third thing that is essentially free. It doesn’t cost you anymore to reach 2 million people than it does reaching 1 million people. Because the previous economic model was that you could only broadcast a few things to those 2 million people, you had to invent mass media and try to find something that appeals to everyone. The reality is, not “Everyone Loves Raymond”. Everyone might kinda LIKE Raymond, but… meh.

The things that mark us as individuals are the places we disagree on, but the market of scarcity is where we end up with this mass media, dull, boring media.

It costs 1/4 of a cent per person per hour to stream video, and when it’s that cheap, it’s easy to waste YouTube’s processors, their storage and their bandwidth with your home videos, your snow boarding videos, your goofy bar conversations.

The future of television is LonelyGirl15. Sure, she’s an actress who was trying to jump start her career, but she had a similar audience to “Everyone Loves Raymond” at her peak. She’s a character who would never be approved by the traditional mass media powers that be. This is not something we ever expected to see, but every experiment that can run, will run on the internet.

This economy of free allows us to maximize the potential space and see what sticks. Most are not viable, some are extraordinary… the only reason that this is even possible is because we’re wasting processing, bandwidth and storage. There’s no gatekeeper or approval process, and that liberating feeling of free is helping us figure out who we are as a person. When there’s no one that we need to get approval from, it allows us to experiment and do whatever we want.

In a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost.” if you write down only one thing from this keynote today, this is it. What if the marginal cost is zero? (or so close to zero, that someone will treat it as zero) Everything that can become digital will become digital and everything that is digital will become free.

Let me repeat that:

Everything that can become digital will become digital and everything that is digital will become free.

Turns out there’s a price even lower for free - paying people to use their service. Chris thinks we’ll get there. But basically the threshold of free has been reached.

Bill Gates has always known that his products do not cost much to create, but Microsoft fought free with their monopoly. Remember the original statement: “In a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost.”, and yet, Microsoft is still selling office for $300. Hrm.

We’re coming into a world of non-monetary economies with incentives other than cash. Blogging and other ways of finding incentives through recognition, attention etc.

Every abundance creates a new scarcity. Time + Money +…. Attention. The only way you can make money is in a market of scarcity, but the majority of the opportunities are in the free and abundance market.

We’re about to move into the Q&A shortly, so I’ll publish this now, and add my images, and maybe the audio from Heather later.