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The Network Observer Vol 02 No 11
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 11 NOVEMBER 1995
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"You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and
build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent,
vibrant structure of which people can be part."
-- Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition
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This month: Designing genres for new media
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Welcome to TNO 2(11).
This month's issue consists of a single long article, an informal
manifesto on sociocentric design that I wrote for an introductory
Internet class and presented at a recent publishing symposium in
Portugal. The WorldWide Web makes everyone a publisher in some
basic sense, and new media in general vastly expand the scope
of potential innovation in communications between individuals
and groups. My experience, though, is that too many people,
both professionals and amateurs, try to design for new media
through an unarticulated sense of what they "like". My argument
is that design for new media (which, these days, really means all
media) requires some mapping of the social relationships around
a given type of communication. This process doesn't replace the
designer's skill of writing, layout, choice of type, and so on,
but it *is*, I think, a prerequisite for the rational application
of this skill. The central concept is "genre" -- the expectable
forms of communication that fit into particular forms of activity
involving relationships between communities of people. I explain
what this means, and I sketch some examples. Much work obviously
remains to be done to put these thoughts into practice, but
perhaps they will be helpful even on an abstract level.
The usual TNO departments -- wish list, recommendations, and
follow-up, have all been crowded out by the length of this one
article, which runs over the usual 50K length of a TNO issue.
They'll be back next month.
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Designing genres for new media:
Social, economic, and political contexts
//1 Introduction
Portrayals of a digital future are too often monolithic:
everything will be digital, everyone will be wired, all media
will converge into one, and the physical world will wither away.
This kind of monolithic story is wrong, I think, and particularly
unfortunate when it comes to the future of communications media.
In fact, perhaps the most distinctive feature of the unfolding
digital present is a proliferation of new media and new forms
of communicative interaction between people: the Web, CD-ROM's,
economical printing on demand, cellular telephones, messaging
pagers, fax machines, MUD's, optical scanners, voice mail, and
many other media have become widespread in recent times, and
more will be marketed soon. Perhaps these media will undergo
a shake-out, leading back to the relatively homogeneous days of
yore. But more likely, I think, media will continue to multiply.
Everybody's daily life will include a whole ecology of media;
some of these will be voluntarily chosen and others will be
inescapable parts of life in public spaces and the workplace.
As media proliferate and change, the task of designers becomes
more difficult. By "designers" I mean to include everyone --
authors, composers, performers, public speakers, letter-writers,
editors, and others -- who make decisions about the format and
content of communications media, whether for others' purposes
or their own. More indirectly I also mean to include the people
-- librarians, publishers, book sellers, programmers, critics,
anthologists, and others -- who operate the distribution channels
that connect the producers and the users of media products.
Designing for media, and particularly for new media where stable
conventions have yet to be established, requires many kinds of
effort -- research, experimentation, rational choice, iteration
of prototypes, and learning from the work of others. Many skills
enter into the process. In this article I want to focus on a
single theme: the design of genres that fit into the activities
of the audience one hopes to reach. Design for new media, I want
to argue, requires some rational understanding of who is using
the materials, what they are doing with them, and how they fit
into an overall way of life. Such elaborate ideas about the
audience might not have been necessary in the old days, when
media were few and their uses evolved slowly. That is not so
today, and it is not just possible but crucial for designers to
learn what is known about the uses of media and to contribute to
such knowledge themselves.
My analysis will be divided into three parts. In the first part
I will present a framework for media design based on inquiry
into the role of genres in people's activities, followed by
some examples. Putting these concepts to work will result in
a vast space of potential genres and uses of media. The second
part, therefore, will describe some of the economic forces
that tend to select among these various potentialities, and
the third part will sketch some of the democratic values that
might guide concerned citizens and professionals in shaping the
media infrastructures and policies of the future. Nothing is
inevitable, not even in technology, and some of the choices we
might make about communications media right now are much better
than others.
//2 Framework for media design
Design should be an iterative process, and much of the learning
that develops through iteration concerns the uses that people
might make of the materials you are designing. I want to suggest
that the principal *object* of design for new media is a *genre*
-- that is, an expectable form that materials in a given medium
might take. Here are some examples of genres:
romance novels
op-ed articles
IRS tax forms
scientific research papers
statistical tables
Romantic poems
"tagging" graffiti
the blues
business memos
street maps
conference announcements
corporate financial reports
encyclopedias
sales pitches
action-adventure movies
shoot-'em-up video games
Notice several things about this list:
1. Genres can be defined more or less broadly. Depending on
one's purposes, one may wish to focus specifically on research
papers in biology, or on early blues, or on sales pitches for
condominium time-shares, or on French companies' financial
reports. An advertising campaign, for example, might be
regarded as a small genre that inserts a range of elements
into a recognizable shared frame.
2. Each genre implies a particular sort of audience and a
particular sort of activity (Bazerman 1988). Who the audience
actually is and what they are actually doing are, of course,
fairly difficult empirical matters. But romance novels and
graffiti and financial reports do fit into people's lives in
particular ways.
3. Each genre also implies a certain kind of relationship
between the producer(s) and consumer(s) of the materials in
question. The relationship may be a one-to-one personal or
professional acquaintanceship, or it might be a one-to-many
performer-to-audience interaction, or it might be mediated by
institutionalized distribution channels. Interests may conflict,
matters may be concealed, money may change hands, persuasion may
be intended or disavowed, useful information may be conveyed,
reputations may be enhanced, and so forth. All of these aspects
of the relationship will shape both the genre and the activities
within which it is used.
4. A genre implies not a single document but a stream of them.
Even if the "rules" of a given genre are never codified, past
instances of each genre create precedents and expectations
for the interpretation of subsequent instances. Genres permit
people to seek out "more like that one", and they permit the
establishment of efficient, familiar, habitual routines for using
the materials.
5. The genre does not, however, fully constrain the ways that
instances of it might be used. Financial reports might be read
as if they were literary texts, IRS forms might be mined for
poetic phrases, blues songs might be sampled to make hip-hop
songs, video games might be played as if the goal were to *avoid*
killing anyone, sales pitches might be solicited for use as
sociolinguistic data, research papers might be interpreted as
business plans, and romance novels might be read by those who
hope that the heroine is going to blow off the brooding guy and
go get a life.
6. Any given way of life will involve the routine use of several
genres. Tourism involves guidebooks, menus, street signs,
timetables, roadmaps, phrase books, and postcard notes back home.
Genres sometimes imply one another, at least in the loose sense
that they will need to take up complementary roles in the same
kinds of activity.
7. Genres change historically. The changes might be encouraged
by regulation, by competition or influence from other genres,
from changes in the lives of their users, from shifts to
new media, or by the changing purposes of the people who are
producing them. The changes might be decided consciously,
evolve incrementally, or arise through the "natural selection"
of markets and other mechanisms.
I want to focus on genres because, in analytical terms, they
are the meeting-point between the process of producing media
materials and the process of using them. Depending on your
purposes, be they commercial or political or personal, you might
wish to start out at either end. The point is to cultivate an
understanding of how the two halves fit together. Building on
the observations I have just enumerated, I want to formalize
such understandings under five headings: communities, activities,
relationships, media, and genres. The point is not to formulate
vast generalizations about these five abstractions but to
have a handy schedule of questions to ask in mapping out the
relationships between people and media in particular situations.
Communities. A community is a the set of people who occupy a
given structural location in an institution or society. Examples
include immigrants to the United States, employees of temporary
agencies, owners of a particular model of car, the CEO's of
insurance companies, students in journalism schools, members of
the ACLU, Republican candidates for state senate offices, public
librarians, neighbors of a company's factories, regulars at the
Upside Grill, people eligible for the draft, family farmers,
unemployed scientists, and paroled felons. A community might
have a stronger or weaker sense of itself *as* a community. It
might or might not have its own organization, and might or might
not meet as a group. But most communities engage in some degree
of collective cognition -- the interactions through which they
learn from one another's experiences, set common strategies,
develop a shared vocabulary, and evolve a distinctive way of
thinking. (See TNO 2(7).) These interactions might take place
through war stories, newsletters, rumors, conference speeches,
philosophical tracts, music videos, management consultants, or
bards who travel from place to place bearing news.
Activities. The life of every community includes shared forms
of activity within a particular institutional logic. This is not
to say that the community members mechanically follow a rulebook,
although sometimes they may have little other choice. The point,
rather, is that the commonalities of their lives and goals and
surroundings, together with their collective thinking about
their situations and futures, tend to lead to similar patterns
of activity. These include the activities through which
particular kinds of media are used, but they include much more.
In particular, it does not suffice to identify an activity
such as "reading" without asking how this "reading" is part of
some larger pattern of social practice. For example, students
studying for an exam may apply procedures of reading that chop
a book's contents into discrete, memorizable facts according to
an economic calculation of which ones are likely to count for
how much on the exam. This might be contrasted with the reading
engaged in by American men reading the post-Vietnam war fiction
that was inspired by characters like Rambo, with the way that
Washington insiders read the newspaper to assess how yesterday's
action is going to play back home, or with the business
people who read the books of business gurus while asking "what
concretely does *this* and *this* and *this* mean in the context
of my own industry and firm?". Each kind of "reading" reflects
a perfectly legitimate way of using a text for culturally and
institutionally organized practices. Note that "activities"
include both the physical actions (sitting, writing, talking,
looking, turning pages, pushing buttons, etc) and the cognitive
and emotional processes (identifying with characters, figuring
out what's important, wondering what the professor thinks is
important, catching the allusions, etc). The genre needs to
"fit" with the whole complex of "external" and "internal" aspects
of the activity.
Relationships. The members of a community share a social
"location" because they share relationships to people in other,
adjacent locations. Thus temporary employees have relationships
to temp agency managers, managers of firms that contract for
temps, employees of those firms who have permanent status, and
so on. Family farmers must contend with bankers, shippers,
extension workers, their own family members, and so on. The
lives of people in communities are similar largely because of the
similarities of their relationships, and much of a community's
shared thinking is concerned with these relationships. Farmers
chat about dealings with bankers, managers discuss their dealings
with the people they supervise, voters listen to poll numbers
about their fellow voters' supposed views on the candidates,
sales people read books by other sales people about selling
things to buyers, and so on. Many of the characteristic
activities of a community either directly involve these
relationships (asking for a loan, writing a report, casting a
vote, holding a meeting, and so on) or are heavily influenced
by them (learning skills, gathering ammo, making oneself
presentable, thinking about analogous relationships in others'
lives, and so on). Relationships between particular individuals
or institutions have life cycles: employment contracts and family
relationships, for example, tend to pass through a more or less
expectable series of stages within a given society, each with its
characteristic issues and forms of activity.
Media. Media are the specific technical means of communication:
telephone, television, CD-ROM's, video tapes, magazines, books,
face-to-face conversation, smoke signals, drums, chalkboards,
billboards, radio, clothing, and so on. People use media in
activities, and the technical affordances of the media condition
how they can be used. For example, it is difficult to carry a
VHS playback system, it is physically painful to read a long text
on a computer screen, radio is much easier to use while driving
than television, overhead transparencies can be projected better
onto whiteboards than chalkboards, e-mail requires net access,
face-to-face conversation requires travel, and so on. But media
should not be confused with genres: radio supports both Top 40
programs and call-in talk shows, a magazine usually contains a
stable mix of several genres among its contents, and the genres
of face-to-face conversation include performance evaluations,
party smalltalk, paranoid harangues, and accounts of one's
research interests at a conference.
Genres. A genre, again, is a relatively stable, expectable form
of communication. Genres are addressed to particular communities
and fit into particular activities in the lives of that
community's members. Of course, a given genre might be addressed
to several different purposes simultaneously, or even to several
different communities, but it stands to reason that a genre
cannot be too many things to too many kinds of people without
diluting its usefulness for any one of them. It is probably best
to identify a genre with a particular medium: a folk song goes
through important changes in its transition from live performance
to audio recording to music video. A novel might not change its
words in the transition from paper to CD-ROM, but nobody really
knows whether anyone has any use for a novel on a CD-ROM, or
whether CD-ROM's need new genres that can participate in the
activities for which the CD-ROM medium can actually be useful
to the members of a particular community. It helps to think of
a genre in historical terms as the product of an ongoing process
of coevolution between its producers and consumers. Genres
are effectively codesigned with forms of activity, even if this
codesign process might be unconscious, haphazard, or even the
result of conflict between parties with differing interests or
worldviews. In particular, every genre implies a distinctive
constellation of relationships: it is supposed to be useful
to members of a given community, in activities whose forms and
purposes are heavily influenced by relationships with the members
of particular other communities.
I have sketched, then, an analytical framework consisting of
communities, activities, relationships, media, and genres. The
purpose of this framework, once again, is not to give precise
abstract definitions to each of these terms. Instead, the
framework is supposed to be useful in making sense of particular
cases, whether for understanding what people are already doing
with genres or for designing new genres. It can be highly
illuminating to map out all of the communities, activities,
relationships, media, and genres in a given environment. One
might start this process anywhere one likes, for example with a
community one hopes to help or a medium for which one hopes to
design new materials. I find it useful to start with particular
genres, precisely because they form the boundary between the
processes of production and consumption.
//3 Some examples
When designing genres for new media, the slogan is: "do more".
Pick a community, explore how existing genres fit into existing
activities and relationships, and then consider how a new genre
might "do more" for the people than the ones they already use.
The new genre might, for example, be designed to ease certain
functions (like searching or sorting or comparing or pooling
group efforts) that the people now perform laboriously for
themselves, or that they rarely perform because it is so
difficult. For example, if you're working with reporters who
must routinely produce documents that draw together information
from several different sources, then you can provide them with
documents that draw together as many of those sources as you have
access to. These documents would not simply dump the information
in a pile, but would arrange it in a rational, intelligible form
that creates and satisfies a stable set of expectations. I will
return to the broader meaning of doing more for communities later
on, but here let us consider some examples.
An example that arose during a recent workshop on these issues is
the genre of art indexes. These are reference works connecting
works of art to the authors who produced them. They are found on
paper, but mainly today, I am told, they are found on CD-ROM's.
The communities that employ them consist mostly of students and
scholars, and the relationships of these communities include
teachers, critics, the artists themselves, the public of art
enthusiasts, curators, and scholars in related fields such
as literature. The activities that community members engage
in include writing papers (which may be usefully decomposed
into a variety of other activities), conducting seminars, and
presenting talks. And the other genres produced or consumed
in these activities include research papers, scholarly books of
art criticism, student term papers, other reference works, class
presentations, popular articles, and so on.
Given this background, it is possible to reason about how the
art index genre might evolve. More detailed information might be
required, for example what questions someone writing a research
paper has in mind when opening an art index, what other questions
they have in mind at other times, what later uses are typically
made of the facts discovered in the index, how particular works
of art are employed as examples in classroom teaching and the
apprenticeship process of seminars, and so forth. One could
spend a lifetime exploring these questions, but even a little
such exploration will quickly provide the raw material for
brainstorms about other applications of the genre or other genres
that might fit into the activities of the relevant communities.
For example, what kinds of reference materials might be invented
to support the social processes of seminars? The media would
probably need to be located in the seminar room itself, though
it could have remote connections elsewhere. Perhaps it would
be useful to brief specialized librarians ahead of time on a
seminar topic so that relevant materials could be placed in
a menu. Perhaps it would be useful to have a genre of visual
presentations to support compare-and-contrast types of reasoning
in seminar settings. And so on.
Evaluating such proposals is obviously not simple. The only real
test of their practicability is to try them, hopefully through
iterative participatory prototyping (Bjerknes, Ehn, and Kyng
1987; Schuler and Namioka 1993). The design process itself will
presumably lead to fresh discoveries about the real nature of the
relevant communities, activities, and relationships, and it might
even change them. Any such change will not be "caused" by the
new genres, at least not in any simple sense. The changes will
express latent potentials in the local social system, and they
will be influenced heavily by the participants' own (shared or
conflicting) understandings of the situation. The changes might
settle into a new equilibrium, with genres once again fitted
to activities that express relationships between communities.
Alternatively the changes might continue, fueled by the social
system's internal dynamics or by exogenous factors, including
further innovations in media and genres of communication.
As another example, let us consider the design process involved
getting a particular organization "on the Web" by creating some
prototype Web pages. In my experience, most organizations try to
jump directly to layout and graphics and bullets and hyperlinks,
steering by an unarticulated sense of what they "like" without
thinking through the issues in a strategic way. The relevant
questions include:
* Who are these pages for? What defines their relationship to
us? What goes on in the life of each community? How is each
community changing?
* What purpose are these pages supposed to serve in the context
of our relationship with these people? What are the stages in
the life cycle of our relationship with each individual in a
given community, and what role (if any) is each medium and genre
supposed to play in each stage of the cycle?
* What activities are the people going to be engaged in when
they call up our Web pages? What are they trying to accomplish?
What specific questions do they have in mind? Do they have
that kind of question often? What other questions do they have
at other times? What other media and genres do they employ
in the course of these activities? Are these activities aimed
principally at producing materials in other particular genres?
Which ones? What is the connection between our materials and
theirs?
* Are they going to use our pages just once, or whenever a
particular problem arises, or on a regular basis? What existing
genres, whether on the Web or in other media, are going to shape
their expectations when they encounter the new genre of Web pages
we are designing?
* What are Web pages going to do for these people that cannot
be done better on paper memos or brochures, over the telephone,
by electronic mail, in meetings, through posters or newspaper
advertisements, and so on? What role do these other media
already play in our relationship with these people? Do they
already use the Web for other things? Do they tend to have a
Web client running on their computer at all times? Or do we hope
that they'll get up to speed on the Web just to use our pages?
* How much will our pages change? Will they contain a steady
stream of new content? A steady evolution of the existing
content? What expectations will the user communities have about
these changes, and what expectations would we like to encourage
them to have through the design of our genre of Web pages?
Through what division of labor will the pages be maintained?
* How will the people hear about your Web page and learn your
URL? Through a print advertisement? Business card? Electronic
mail? News article? Scrap of paper scribbled at a conference?
Do your plans effectively require the people to put your URL in
their hotlist?
* How do the practical properties of the Web medium fit with
the activities that these people are going to be engaged in?
Do the activities take place at a desk with a computer on it?
On the move with a Web-connected portable computer? What else
can they be doing during the several seconds it takes to boot
their computer or launch their Web client or download our page?
What else can they be doing during the several moments it takes
to follow each link within our pages? How powerful are their
computers? Do they share their computers with others? What kind
of bandwidth do they have to the net? Will they be using our
pages at high-load times of day?
* Is absorbing the futuristic cachet of the Internet going to
be a significant part of the activity of using our Web pages?
Will this be the case next year as well?
* If we want several different communities to use our pages,
are the answers to these questions similar or different for each?
Should we design separate pages for each group? A separate
starting-point ("home page") for each group, perhaps with links
to overlapping sets of materials? Do we want to exclude certain
communities from access to particular materials (home phone
numbers are a common example) that we wish to make available to
other communities?
These questions will have very different answers for different
purposes -- that's the whole point. Some of the answers might
be unknown, or they might be uneven across a given community, or
they might change. Having at least sketched the answers to them,
one is in a position to start designing and prototyping pages.
The next step might be to sit down with some representatives of
each user community, show them the pages, and get them to talk
about their activities and the role of various media and genres
within those activities.
//4 Economic considerations
Discussions of new media are often framed in terms of "where
things are going". The idea is to predict the future and then
to accommodate oneself to it, hopefully to maximum advantage.
This kind of reasoning leaves a great deal out. The future is
not a deterministic outcome of a mechanical procedure; it is a
human choice whose outcome may be constrained and biased but is
not settled in advance. Only when we believe we have choices
do we start articulating our values and figuring out how they
apply to the situation at hand. Economic considerations help
in understanding the practicalities of these choices, including
the choices that other people are likely to make. They are only
one part of the larger picture -- or at least they ought to be.
Nonetheless, the vast range of potential applications of new
media make the choices exceptionally difficult, and it will be
helpful to take a broad range of considerations routinely into
account during the design process. In this section I am going to
describe some economic concepts that can influence the design of
genres in new media -- or of genres that address new situations
using old media.
A genre, once again, is not a single document or event. Instead,
it is a form of media materials, and it implies a steady flow of
materials that can play a definite role in the activities of some
community. The economics of genres are the economics of this
flow and these activities. Here are some issues to consider,
some of which apply more directly to genres and others of which
apply more directly to the media in which they are realized:
* Fixed costs of distribution. One force for concentration
in industry is the overhead involved in creating a network of
distribution channels. Since this overhead must be recovered
through sales of the stuff that passes through the channels,
competition makes it necessary to fill the channels to capacity.
Fixed costs of distribution include brand awareness through
advertising, creating and updating policies about personnel
and customer relationships, facilities and course materials
for training personnel, product design costs, capital assets
such as storefronts and vending machines and trucks, and so on.
Newspapers have high fixed costs of distribution.
* Marginal cost of distribution. Once the fixed overhead costs
have been paid, what does it then cost to actually sell someone
a product? This includes the manufacturing and shipping of a
single unit, personnel time and paperwork to execute the sale,
the rate of customer complaints and returns and other transaction
problems, and so on. If the total of these costs is low compared
to the fixed costs of distribution per customer then competitive
forces will drive the industry toward monopoly until antitrust
enforcement or diseconomies of scale set in. Information
commodities tend to have low marginal costs of distribution
because it is so easy to make new copies of an original.
* Fixed costs of consumption. What does it cost to become
able to consume a particular kind of product or service? For
information commodities these costs can be usefully classified
into machines (to play records you need a record player), skills
(to consume sheet music you have to learn to play a musical
instrument), and content (to use software a hundred times you
need to purchase it at least once). Machine costs tend to be
associated with media, not genres, and skill costs tend to be
associated partly with media and partly with genres (learning
to play classical piano gets you halfway toward learning to play
jazz piano). These fixed costs must be paid back across the
particular occasions of consumption, which should hopefully be
numerous. Some genres, like classical CD's and video games, are
used in activities that entail using a given package of content
repeatedly; others, like novels, are not. When content costs
are high, it can make sense to rent (videotapes from Blockbuster)
or share (books from the library) the content-bearing artifacts.
All types of fixed costs of consumption can raise distributional
questions when they are high, as with the case of "equity of
access to the NII". This is particularly true when media that
have high fixed costs of consumption (e.g., television or
networked computers) compete against media that have high fixed
costs of production (e.g., newspapers or books). As the latter
lose their needed economies of scale and are forced to distribute
their fixed costs among ever-fewer units, they will consolidate
among themselves and may ultimately collapse. Those who cannot
afford high fixed costs of consumption will be left without any
service at all, since they can only consume a limited number of
high-fixed-cost commodity streams.
* Marginal costs of consumption. These include the price of
the commodity itself (assuming it has one), but it can include
a lot of other costs as well. These can include travel costs,
wear and tear on bodies and machines, the risk of accidents, and
the opportunity cost of not having done something else instead.
* Specialization. Information commodities undergo two powerful
economic pressures that push in opposite directions. It is well
known, on one hand, that their high fixed costs of production
and low marginal costs of production create powerful competitive
incentives for distributing them to the largest possible
audience. On the other hand, there often exists a pressure for
specialization to particular communities, known to marketing
people as market segments. This is obviously in part a question
of genre: genres can often be tailored to the needs of more
specific groups. Both pressures operate at all points in the
market at all times. The balance between them can vary wildly,
causing markets for particular products and genres to appear or
disappear overnight. The emergence of a mass software market,
for example, caused some categories of software to drop in price
by two orders of magnitude. Content producers are developing
a range of strategies to deal with these contending forces.
Software can be tailored locally by setting a range of switches
or through the purchase of utilities or add-on packages (as
with the huge range of packages for use with Notes). Printed
materials like books and brochures can be tailored locally as
well through new technologies for economical printing on demand.
This creates a need for genres for specifying a whole grammar of
possible documents. Simple versions of this phenomenon include
syndicated newspaper columns that include optional paragraphs
that can be trimmed to fit space restrictions, as well as
professors' "reading packets" assembled from a batch of chapters
and articles from various sources. But much more complex
versions are possible as well, all the way out to artificial
intelligence techniques that design documents (like instruction
manuals or advertising brochures) within a set of genre
conventions based on elaborate symbolic representations to the
uses to which they will be put.
* Practicalities of duplication. Records can be copied to
cassette tape and books can be photocopied, but neither process
is particularly convenient. Copying software, though, is usually
easy. People will be more likely to make illicit copies if their
social network includes other members of the relevant community.
* Time-critical nature of use. If the value of a commodity
decreases rapidly over time then distribution costs will probably
be higher. On the other hand, if an information commodity (like
a stock price) loses its value quickly then illicit copying and
sharing is probably going to be less prevalent.
* Third-party costs and benefits of consumption. Television,
radio, and print media advertisers subsidize the publications
they advertise in because they expect to profit from your
attention having been brought to their advertising. On a more
subtle level, companies hire PR firms to "sell" friendly stories
to the media because they expect to enjoy benefits if the story
gets an audience. (Among political campaign operatives and
advocacy people, this practice is sometimes known by the
wonderful phrase "earned media".) Even when no money changes
hands, this is effectively a subsidy to the media because it
saves them the trouble of digging up the story themselves, and
media firms that do this enjoy a cost advantage, other things
being equal, over their competitors (Gandy 1982). Third parties
can also suffer costs from information consumption: rumors can
cause harm to their subjects and trade secrets are worth less
to their owners once they leak out. It follows in each case
that effort will often be expended to suppress them, or at least
to get some control over the process by which they become news.
(Think, for example, about the Netscape "Bugs Bounty".)
* Brand identity of the content stream. One might think about
a magazine, for example, as branded content. A brand is a set of
expectations and associations that a given community has about a
product, and attaching a brand to one's content stream is a way
of explaining what it is and enabling satisfied consumers to get
"more like that". Newsletter editors, novelists, genre fiction
publishers, concert promoters, television networks, record
labels, booksellers, trade associations, and think tanks all try
to brand the content streams they produce, with varying degrees
of success. The ability to extract income from a content brand
depends on the audience's ability to predict the qualities of
each next unit of content before they buy it. The matter is
particularly interesting in the case of brands established
by distributors: television networks, booksellers, concert
promoters, and so on. In some cases these brands are based
on matters that go beyond the "content" narrowly speaking, for
example how well-run the concerts are. In other cases they
are based on the selection of materials to suit a particular
audience, as in a special-interest bookstore or a magazine.
Brands increasingly cross media boundaries; the "Lion King"
brand, for example, is generating revenue across dozens of media.
A content stream needs a brand whether or not money changes
hands; a free Internet newsletter, for example, needs to build
an audience over time, consisting of people who have read a few
issues and are willing to read further issues on the expectation
of getting "more like that". In all cases, the crucial thing
(the basis for reckoning "like that") is how the stuff fits into
the reader's life (its "use value" in one idiom), and that in
turn depends on its relevance to that person's relationships and
goals. Libraries and other public sources of information tend
to fight against the logic of brands, and reasonably so, because
their justification is based on serving the general public's
needs, not the summed needs of a series of market segments. Yet
it's hard to think about the general public in concrete terms.
* Transaction costs. These are the costs of selling something
to someone: finding customers/suppliers, free samples and
browsing rights, negotiating the contract, dealing with later
problems with the contract, collecting the money, keeping track
of the money, getting the money to the bank, and so on. In
the case of information commodities, these transaction costs
can exceed the marginal cost of producing the commodity itself.
As the cost of electronic transactions goes down, the contracts
for purchase of information commodities may shift from a fixed
per-copy price ($99 for a spreadsheet program) to a per-usage
price ($0.001 per command that you type on the spreadsheet).
This is certainly Microsoft's plan.
* Compatibility and standards. Contrary to the dogmata of
neoclassical economics, media industries are powerfully
path-dependent because of effects deriving from the compatibility
of different commodities. VHS thrived and consigned Beta to a
living death, but this was not because VHS was the better format.
(Many think it wasn't.) Rather, each standard had high fixed
costs of both consumption (for the player) and distribution (for
the stock of the video rental stores), and VHS got started first
and had a better alliance of content producers and distributors
lined up. Microsoft Windows grows and grows, but not because it
is the better operating system. In each case, an initial market
advantage permitted a de facto standard to become embedded in the
economy. People buy Windows because a lot of software exists for
Windows; a lot of companies write software for Windows because a
lot of people have bought Windows; people generally use just one
operating system because of the high costs and low benefits of
using more. Telecommunications industries in particular exhibit
powerful critical mass phenomena. Everything needs to work the
same way because everyone's equipment needs to be compatible
with that of everyone they call; it is hard to introduce new
categories of equipment when it's not useful unless most everyone
you call is also using it. (This is why the PGP encryption
scheme is still miles from being a "standard" in any real
economic sense.)
All of these considerations should influence anybody who is
considering the introduction of a new medium or genre. The
really harsh effects operate more strongly on the media than
on the genres, but in each case it is not sufficient for one's
product to be "better" as measured in a vacuum. In particular, I
want to stress that the considerations just listed include three
strong arguments for believing -- contrary to an enormous amount
of passionately argued ideology -- that media industries tend
toward monopoly:
* Information commodities, to an even great extent than
classical monopolies based on physical infrastructures, like
utilities and railroads, have high fixed costs and low marginal
costs of production. A company is rewarded heavily for having
a large customer base because it can distribute its costs more
widely, thereby creating huge barriers to entry.
* When consumers are making frequent choices among commodities
whose qualities are hard to assess in advance, as with books
and videos, brand identity counts for a great deal. A great
advantage thereby goes to the organization that can amortize the
high fixed costs of establishing a brand identity across a higher
number of customers. (An advantage also derives from generating
a higher number of media products under the same brand umbrella,
but this can be accomplished through licensing once the brand has
been established in the first place.)
* Once proprietary standards become entrenched in the
marketplace, so that compatibility effects create ever-higher
barriers to entry for potential competitors, their owners
can start to extract rents from a variety of other parties.
Moreover, network externalities (costs to individuals that
derive from everyone else's choices) mean that dominance over a
market tends to expand once it is established. Microsoft Windows
is just about the worst possible case of these effects. Such
situations can be prevented if a critical mass of customers (or,
in some cases, other interested parties such as content producers
for a prospective new medium) can exert bargaining power by
acting in a coordinated way early enough to influence vendors'
choices in the direction of nonproprietary standards and open
architectures. This can happen if the customers are few and
large, are able to cooperate, have a high degree of understanding
of the issues, and are thinking ahead -- conditions that are
rarely all met.
//5 Political considerations
Economic reasoning about the media easily gives the impression
of a seamless, impenetrable logic that neither requires nor
permits dialog with political concerns. Yet the most significant
questions surrounding the emergence of new media pertain
precisely to their role in encouraging or discouraging democratic
values. To be sure, technologies do not straightforwardly
determine political cultures. A given technology can be
appropriated in a variety of different ways, and technologies
always coevolve to a certain extent with the institutional
structures around them. In the past it has seemed sufficient to
inquire about such things one medium at a time -- "what is the
effect of television on democracy?", "need radio have evolved
into a centralized medium driven principally by advertiser
sponsorship?", and so on, or else to pose the issues in terms of
an orderly whole called "the media" or "the press".
The rapid proliferation of new media, though, may call for a
new type of analysis. Digital networks such as the Internet,
for example, are so flexible that it is practically impossible
to imagine the range of architectural choices that lie ahead.
Indeed, the Internet is capable of simultaneously supporting a
considerable range of facilities, each of which would count in
normal times as a separate medium. These media might in turn
support a wide range of genres, which might fit into people's
lives in a wide variety of ways. To reason about the political
values that such technological developments might support or
inhibit, I think it is important to return to basics and pose the
general question of the role that communications genres as such
play in the life of a democracy.
It is useful to pose this question specifically in terms
of genres because, as I have explained at some length above,
genres tend to imply and be implied by forms of activity within
communities. Of course, communities engage in numerous forms of
activity, some of which have greater significance for democratic
values than others. Perhaps the most democratically significant
activities are those through which communities conduct their
collective cognition -- the group thinking through which a
community's members shares experiences, maintains memories,
conducts conflicts, and performs its work of solidarity
with regard to all of the other communities to which it is
structurally related. It is an obvious fact that, in society
as we know it, some communities have more effective means for
engaging in these kinds of group thinking. A core democratic
value, I would suggest, is broad access to the means of
collective cognition.
What are the conditions of collective cognition? In some
cases they might include physical meeting spaces, and it may be
important for these spaces to serve a range of other functions in
addition to formally organized discussions. In other cases they
might include the existence of a viable community publication
such as a newsletter or newspaper. It probably matters whether
the community is concentrated or dispersed in geographic terms,
and whether it can travel. It probably matters whether other
communities, such as employers, derive benefits from the shared
thinking of the community's members, as in the case of many
professional associations. It probably matters whether the
community's members have some way of accumulating capital by
serving as thought leaders, circulating among the community's
members and synthesizing what they hear into a form that is
broadly useful. All of these considerations, in turn, depend
upon the economics of genres, travel, careers, professions, real
estate, and much else. Someone who wishes to design genres of
communication that support democratic values, then, must assess
a larger and probably quite complicated picture. No single
solution will fit all purposes.
Nonetheless, some general considerations do apply broadly.
Much attention has been focused on one of these: the relationship
between producers and consumers of content within a given genre
and medium. Broadcast television and the Internet are frequently
held out as opposite extremes in this regard, in the sense
that anybody with a computer and some basic skills (admittedly
significant fixed costs of both production and consumption)
can create content for the Internet, but hardly anybody can
create content for television (and only under a great mass of
constraints). But it is important to understand that the degree
of symmetry in the producer-consumer relationship is not wholly
determined by the technology. Marketing considerations are
significant as well: the power to create a coherent brand image
across a coherent segment of the population is simultaneously the
power to concentrate enough capital to gather facts, pay writers,
support travel to the places where news can be gathered, maintain
the most attractive production values, and so on. Whether the
future brings 500 channels or 50 or 5000 may depend as much on
the market logic of segmentation as on the physical capacity of
the medium.
At the same time, the experience of fanzines teaches different
and more appealing lessons. The 1980's fanzine genre was
adapted to numerous aspects of the music-centered youth culture
from which it emerged. Since the genre created a stable set
of expectations, people could decide that they are interested
in 'zines as a category, and this enabled mechanisms such as
Factsheet 5 to arise to spread knowledge of them to a definite
audience. Broad access to desktop publishing and photocopying
provided basic production methods, and the genre incorporated
the properties and limitations of these methods as part of its
visual language. But fanzines did not operate in isolation from
other genres; to the contrary, they coevolved with the genres of
popular music upon which they were explicitly predicated. A fan
who found something of value in a particular band, whether on the
radio or through clubs and cassette circulation, could employ the
fanzine network to join a community with a common language and
common concerns. Mainstream elite discourse may reduce bands
like Metallica or Hole to stereotypes, not least because the
arbiters of this discourse do not participate in the relevant
communities' activities and thus cannot comprehend the genres
that are adapted to them. But such bands provide occasions
for serious political discourse among their adherents, largely
through fan publications and the spaces where fans find one
another.
Another broadly relevant issue, already mentioned in my
enumeration of economic factors above, is the role of third-party
costs and benefits in a community's collective cognition. The
problem is not that a community might be influenced by outside
voices and opinions and pleas. The problem, rather, is the
practice of simulation among practitioners of public relations.
Most of the magazines that serve as the primarily forums for
interest-communities such as car and sports enthusiasts, for
example, are thoroughly corrupted by the influence of advertisers
and other interested parties on the editorial copy. Even general
interest publications such as newspapers rely on information
subsidies from a wide range of interested parties. In each case,
the journalistic voice of the publication is shaped in covert
ways by the interventions of interested parties whose messages
would not have the same "credibility" if openly owned up to.
These effects continually throw into question the notion of an
authentic community voice. How can the channels a community's
collective cognition be designed to be immune to these types of
corruption? One straightforward solution is to make them cheap,
so that outside subsidies are not necessary. And the rapidly
decreasing cost of communications bandwidth ought to contribute
to the emergence of inexpensive channels of group thinking such
as Internet mailing lists. But the bandwidth for distributing
digital material is not the only cost of producing a publication.
One final set of broadly applicable issues concerns the
infrastructure of a political organization. A modern
organization such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and
the Christian Coalition employs a broad range of genres of
communication for its internal operations, chapter and member
relations, campaign mobilizations, networking with related
organizations, recruiting, training, and so on. These genres
might include fact books, pitch letters, member newsletter
articles, op-eds contributed to newspapers, legislative
briefings, support materials for lobbyists, meeting
announcements, and many recurring types of phone calls. One of
the innovations of GOPAC under Newt Gingrich was the development
of a range of additional genres, such as issue-focused conference
calls and training videotapes sent to candidates to watch while
on the road between campaign stops. Likewise, electronic mail
can permit an organization to hold fewer meetings (particularly
of committees) by doing much of the work online. The point
is not that e-mail substitutes for meetings by any fixed
proportionality, but rather that groups can explore which parts
of their collective work can be performed in which medium,
postponing until the physical meeting those interactions which
must be conducted face-to-face. This exploration is precisely
the evolution of genres of communication. As usual, each genre
fits into the broader patterns of activity in the individuals'
lives and the life of the organization, and participation in the
genres is a skill that is acquired and in some way transmitted to
others. To consciously design these genres of communication is
precisely to design the social relationships of the organization
and the values that these relationships reflect.
It is hard to generalize any further about these matters. Few
fixed rules or lessons may exist. The important thing is to use
the proliferation of new media as an opportunity to completely
rethink the place of communication in our lives. We are all
designers in our daily practice of communicating -- in the
small ways in which we innovate and evolve the relatively stable
genres of our mediated interactions with others. But we are
equally dependent upon the professional designers who have the
resources and skills to map out the broad systems of community
relationships within which genres of communication live. This
is why it is so important for the broadest public in a democracy
to become conscious of, and choose, the values that inform
professionalized design. For this design work provides some
of the central conditions for the extension of democracy in the
future, or else its decline.
//* References
These references are obviously incomplete and don't include
citations on the economics of monopoly and standards, but I
expect I will return to these topics later on.
Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and
Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
Gro Bjerknes, Pelle Ehn, and Morten Kyng, eds, Computers and
Democracy: A Scandinavian Challenge, Aldershot, UK: Avebury,
1987.
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies
and Public Policy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982.
Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka, eds, Participatory Design:
Principles and Practices, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1993.
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucla.edu
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles +1 (310) 825-7154
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520 FAX 206-4460
USA
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Copyright 1995 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The
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