The Great Panjandrum

(First published on Kiltr Apr 2017)

It barely registers as surprise, when so much of it is literally communicated in code, to observe data appearing to follow a similar trajectory to the English language. Communication is a coded,obscured process, with the intent behind data, how it is generated and how it is used, words or language often layered and oblique. As far as involvement in the process goes, the English language is a bastardised panjandrum.

Notoriously difficult to learn for speakers of more organised, structured means of communication, English is often said to be typified by its exceptions rather than its rules. And yet, thanks to the follies of empire, colonisation and now the ubiquity of internet connection, English still runs rampant, fudging, morphing, borrowing, bastardising all in its path, the parallel image of the cultures which spawned it.

From the diphthong shift to the tourist shouting louder in a language, as much a symbol of cultural overreach, and often resented just as much, as any pink on a map of the world, English is the mother of obscured, failing communication as much as Westminster is the mother of all failing parliaments in our faltering democracies. Even the term used in it to describe its main means of mass communication derives from a borrowing.

Media is the Latinate plural for medium. Traditionally it is therefore thought, the word should be treated as a pluralised noun in all its senses and should be used with a plural rather than a singular verb, eg ‘the media have not reported on this’ rather than the far more common ‘the media has not reported on this’.  In this sense, the word media behaves in the same way as other collective nouns, like staff or clergy, meaning it has become acceptable for it to take either a singular or plural verb. 

The word has also been increasingly used in a new pluralised form of ‘medias’, as if it had a conventional singular form, particularly when referring to different forms of new media, eg ‘great efforts were made to show this in the medias of many countries’. It is small wonder, when even communicating about communication appears to be made up ‘on the hoof’, the English language can seem confusing, its rules and exceptions so arbitrary, to non-speakers.

I raise these points, with regard to such fickle and oblique means of communication, because, as ever it was, they appear to underlie a tendency to bend toward service in abuses of power. Where once those who would employ its devices in attempts to speak truth to power and found themselves, their words, corrupted by the increments of a society, a culture driven increasingly by the malevolent discernments of capital, now discerning the lies, the ‘fake news’ amidst the glut of words, of data, served up minute by minute, is the challenge to the language processing aspects of our neurologies.

As of March 2017, according to w3techs.com, 52.1% of the top 10 million websites using various content languages were written in English. The second most commonly used language was Russian at just 6.5%. Spanish language based sites ranked fifth at 5.1%. Chinese language based websites were ranked only the ninth most populous on the internet.

In terms of internet users, according to the Miniwatts Marketing Group, as of June 2016, by first or predominant language use, English did rank first but at only 26.3% of all users, with almost double the amount of sites required to cater for their numbers. Chinese ranked second at 20.8%, Spanish third at 7.7% and Russian eighth, with 2.95% of all users.

It seems even in virtual spoace, English speakers are prone to overreach and colonisation of more space than appropriate for their numbers, tending towards a majoritarianism rather than any kind of democratic or proportional digital representation. The percentages may seem vastly smaller but by a matter of degrees, those internet media, bot and sock puppet manipulators in chief, those pesky Russians, are over-represented by a measure of around 2:1 in a similar fashion to English speakers.

All of which brings me to my primary concern in taking fingers to keyboard; remember the glorious promise of the world wide web being something we all made together, not something, an Internet of Things, we just consume?

It is difficult to believe barely twenty five years have transpired since the wonders of the web geared themselves up into existence. Amidst the bright eyed tumult of those heady dawning days, cyber utopians first cast dubious looks askance at the oft vaunted and much celebrated ‘monoculture’, the apparent cultural unity, of what had gone before and decided to offer up something else instead.

For the newly emergent acolytes of a nascent cyber utopia, in the vanguard of what they saw as an ultimately democratising force, monoculture was the hegemon to be opposed and dismantled by the rise and rise of the new medium. Hell, code may even supersede the tyranny of language.

No more would popular taste be dictated by three or four television channels, a handful of radio stations and a restricted number of proprietorially or editorially controlled newspapers. The internet would offer a wild and unfettered range of options, ushering in an eclectic digital paradise. Every aspect of niche culture would have an audience and the very notion of a mainstream, an almost obligatory monoculture, which everyone was expected to like and engage with, had been eclipsed, rendered defunct and meaningless.

But if we skip forward past that wide eyed optimism, yes, the internet has indeed brought greater availability in diversity of cultural choice and made it slightly more possible and acceptable to survive culturally only on the most niche of tastes, but the overwhelming centre of cultural gravity still sits preponderantly in the very market determined, middle of the mainstream. There may be wider access to a more varied cultural output but general media and concomitant social media coverage, how most people shape their cultural tastes and what matters for narrative/market dominance, is actually increasingly controlled and restricted.

Lives, culture, tastes are curated and presented as best versions of themselves, the better to be micro-targetted and marshalled into siloed versions of reality. Data derived from them is the new oil, driving economies dominated by just a few monopolising corporations. And the word, the English language, any language, aspiring to the best obtainable version of the truth becomes further distanced from its own use and our persistent need, as social animals, to communicate. It is no longer its own function, it produces and drives data.

We should remember though, whilst an entire generation have grown up in a not so brave new world, pervaded by the new media of internet ubiquity, digital journalism, which should aspire to be the best obtainable digital version of the truth if it is to retain any semblance of the craft which it seeks to be the next evolution of, is barely a toddler compared to its analogue predecessor. Much like the steep learning curve of a developing infant, digital journalism has already transitioned through readily definable growth phases and developments. We can loosely define the most significant of these as the portal years, the search years and the social years.

Each of these ‘eras’ developed the presentation of narrative, of storytelling and attempted to develop attendant, life sustaining revenue streams. And now, as a fourth era struggles to emerge, some of the original boundless promise of the internet may just be restored, if it can be understood and embraced as the genuinely freeing notion it can become. This may initially seem counterintuitive to everything you think you have come to learn about the internet because in some ways it means hiding information, distributing data from, behind a paywall.

In order to fully understand how this is already beginning to take shape, it is necessary to understand a little of interpretations and applications of Clayton Christensen’s economic disruption theory first:

Following these models, traditional news organisations initially used technology to create sustaining innovations which made their means of production and consumption more efficient. New entrants, however, used technology to create disruptive innovations which built new markets. New internet based news outlets, like Huffington Post or Buzzfeed, built their models for search engine optimisation in the case of the former, or optimised for social media, as in the case of the latter.

Another way of looking at the disruption curve is as a matter of integration vs. modularity. Companies move up the curve in pursuit of profit. In its early stages, at the lower reaches of the curve, a company may just be building a new product with new technology and needs to own the product value chain in order to maintain quality control in getting the product to the consumer. For traditional publishers this meant controlling the newsgathering, distribution and selling of their content. This is an integrated value chain model.

At some point companies will exceed what the consumer actually needs from a product. When this happens the company has overreached or overshot the needs of the consumer. Improved technology means it is more cost effective for a company in this position to outsource aspects of its value chain, becoming a modular model.

A modular value chain exposes a company to fragmentation, making it vulnerable to disruptive competitors, who can target individual, modular or fragmented aspects of the business. When the internet arrived, burgeoning with cultural and commercial promise, it became a threat to traditional publishers, who saw it only as a sustaining innovation. But it was full of opportunity for those who saw it as a disruptive innovation. Against this backdrop, amongst a myriad of other blinking new born cyber babies, digital journalism was born into the portal era.

The period roughly from 1990-1997 was when the course of disruptive digital journalism, as with everything internet related, was determined by portals. These were integrated value chains where the bandwidth, software, servers and news were controlled by the same actors. 

These first new entrants were companies like MSN and AOL with revenues tied directly to display advertising. If you wanted to advertise, you needed to buy space on a portal. These digital gateways closely resembled their print correlatives by being end to end publishing businesses who relied heavily on advertising for revenue.

The portal era evolved into the search era, which extended dominance roughly from 1997-2006. These were years of discovery and modularity with newly dominant search engines generating traffic to newly evolving journalistic sites optimised for search engines.

These were sustaining innovations in digital journalism which drove traffic and ad revenue. In the early years scale was rewarded but by the end of the era new advertising technologies exerted downward pressure on value at scale. Publishers came to recognise they couldn’t achieve enough scale and value at reasonable cost to replace traditional revenue through digital advertising alone.

Digital platforms had begun to overshoot the needs of consumers, ushering in a new market fragmentation. This became an era of unpaid writers, headline optimisation, the beginning of click baiting, pop up advertising, massive multi page galleries, article pagination and unmoderated forums and comment sections. Consumers were no longer being served and there was little approximation of any best obtainable version of the truth amidst the demands from advertising.

In stepped the willing disruptors in the third era of digital journalism, social media, determining the social years, which stretched roughly from 2006 to 2015 in their dominance. During this time the market fragmented even further. Thanks to social networks, primarily Facebook, journalism, like everything else was optimised for social and/or viral ‘buzz’. Click-bait became so ubiquitous it entered common parlance.

Digital journalism, much like many aspects of digitised cultural output, had now failed to meet the needs of consumers both in terms of content and in terms of user experience. At its peak, stories of the social era were optimised for clickability and impressions, not readability or loyalty.

As digital journalism, tracking wider changes in web culture, moved from one era to the next, sites borne of them accumulated legacy infrastructure and resources in advertising technology which made it more difficult to respond to disruption from the next new phase. Whole industries grew up around, and became invested in, their predominant concerns and much like the sites clung to relevance fast becoming outmoded. Of what use will SEO or Social Media Marketing be in a digital world made infinitely more sinister, driven by data-mining and micro-targetting for cynical and corporatist ends, where the vast bulk of data flow is controlled by just five or six companies?

These titans of data, Alphabet (Google’s parent), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are the most valuable listed companies in the world. They collectively notched up over $25 billion in net profit from just the first quarter of this year. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in the US. Google and Facebook were responsible for almost all revenue growth in digital advertising in the US last year.

A new commodity gives rise to a lucrative, fast growing industry and unchecked will attempt to entrench its nascent power. A century ago it happened with oil and the world’s economies have been held ransom by it ever since. Its happening now with data.

These companies have pulled off a classic double bluff. In a digital world, now driven by consumption, their success appears to have been to the benefit of consumers. Google’s search engine seems indispensable, few companies deliver virtually anything in a day like Amazon and Facebook’s newsfeed is still the world’s predominant source of social media interaction. Many of these services seem to be free but users pay by handing over yet more data. It’s now written into the terms and conditions. New approaches are required for the data economy to break the dominance of the big five if more new entrants are to enter the arena.

The public at large have become complicit in the shift to the data economy. The use of mobile devices has made data both more abundant and more valuable. Virtually everything we do now creates a digital trace, raw material for digital distilleries, and machine learning extracts more value from it.

Abundance of data changes the nature of competition. The big data firms surveillance spans the entire economy, Google sees what you search for, Facebook sees what you share, Amazon sees what you buy and where, and all of them track where you are; they have a God’s eye view and make it increasingly unlikely some plucky young disruptive company can come along and dislodge them. They can see when a new product or company gains traction and simply copy it or buy it up.

So where now for any digital start-up, for digital journalism platforms, after twenty years of modularity and accelerated technological progress, where everyone with a blog can generate revenue, becomes a digital publisher and digital journalism, which should be driven by accurate data and information sources, has over-reached, overshot the needs of its consumers?

Reading the same language across disproportionately more than half of the internet, consumers of English language internet based media, like consumers of all media, are now living through an absolute surplus of news and information optimised for advertising and other nefarious aims, including of course ‘fake news’, which has eroded trust and credibility. Consumers of digital journalism are on a general flight towards quality and community. Digital journalism has become commoditised through an increasing necessity. This is creating new market opportunities at the bottom end of a new disruption curve which is not yet good enough, is finding its feet, establishing new norms.

Digital journalism has moved from a modular phase of disruption to a new phase of integration which relies heavily on owning the relationship with your readers through data. It is becoming the inverse of what brought it into being; a disruptive new market, driven by data, drawing on the emergence and applications of machine learning, predictive analytics and a targeted understanding of user behaviour. It is fast catching up with other avenues of digital disruption and finding its own new means of sustainability.

Where some may still be convinced internet services, social media feeds should and do remain free they do so in wilful ignorance of the cost in data mined, behaviours micro-targetted into the silo-ed realities which allowed manipulation of the Brexit and Trump election results. The new era of genuine digital journalism recognises the full cost of that data horse trading, including in diminished trust and credulity. If, as a consumer of digital journalism, you want reliable, well sourced data to flow in the other direction, the simplest, safest model to follow, and the one gaining traction on the flight towards community and quality, is a subscription and/or licensing model.

In attempting to define this new paradigm, David Skok has drawn on the term for organisations relying on subscription revenues to build and improve software services. He argues that owning the platform has become far less important than owning the story and defines a clear competitive advantage for those who own the relationship between the story and the reader, over those who own the means of production and/or platforms of newsgathering and information. Just as subscription revenues built Software as Service, digital journalism is now in the early stages of a phase directly reliant on consumers and for the first time in over a hundred years, journalism, news need not be funded or led by advertising. The forthcoming years of digital journalism will be defined as the era of Stories as Service.

Where readers pay for their digital journalism and publishers can then afford to generate data, information, stories by actually paying journalists to write, creating a double edged data revenue stream, a listening exercise also develops. Publishers become wholly accountable to readers, have to listen to what they actually want. The focus shifts onto accountability metrics like loyalty and retention and further away from an advertising, proprietorial or editorial led slant.

Consumers always subscribed to journalistic content, even if market necessity subsidised it through advertising, through buying newspapers and magazines, then through cable and satellite TV. Increasingly now though, consumers are willing to pay for digital content; Netflix has 93 million subscribers, Spotify 40 million, Apple Music 20 million and Hulu 12 million. Journalistic sites like Medium are phasing in subscription. Even traditional publishers are increasingly replacing their digital advertising revenues with digital subscription revenues.

Most of the publications seeing success from this emergent model rely on quality over quantity journalism. There appears to be a built in tendency towards a niche media focus, which is no bad thing, may just restore some of the original impetus of the internet’s democratising intent. Pivotting to the new era means shedding the notion of using vast advertising ambitions, previously thought as prerequisite to achieving profitability, and instead shifting to subscription ambitions, which require focus on content, quality, engagement, trust and loyalty.

Positive feedback loops will develop with readers, not advertisers or sponsors. For the first time ever it will genuinely only be readers and writers who determine the fate of journalism. As the era evolves publications will need to adapt, to listen and respond in near real time to the vagaries of new and shifting markets. The positive flipside will be that when stories are assigned not for clicks but for loyalty and retention, journalism and its new and developing communities will continue to improve, will be better for it.

Scotland’s responses to the shifts through the eras of digital journalism have quickened as we move into this latest phase. Undoubtedly the debate and political engagement of the Indyref years gave some impetus to flagging traditional publishers on one hand and where they displayed inherent bias and gaps in media coverage grew, a nascent new media landscape emerged on the other. So as the latest phase dawns and publications globally attempt to transition, as purveyors of digital media are you prepared? As a Scottish consumer of digital journalism, as a user of the internet, are you ready?

All that data, all of the information, the feedback loops you thought came for free inside your siloed bubble, never did. Every interaction came at a cost and your data was mined, your reality hacked, shifted, re-aligned around you. The last bastion of genuine freedoms, virtual space, was colonised too, but you can take back control.

You won’t do it by changing a few settings or being more careful about what news makes it onto your newsfeeds, changes will continue to happen all around you, data power will continue to propagate itself. But all is not lost.

The following table shows a Pew Research Centre survey’s results from 2016 on news and information consumption, showing clear distinctions across age groups and a general trend away from newspapers, particularly among younger groups, so it will continue further:

So, as things stand, just to right the media imbalances in Scotland, you maybe buy a National four or five times a week and a Sunday Herald. Or a digital subscription if you’ve realised we should be transitioning to paperless communities as much as we should be to paperless offices. That’s £5.30 a week or so. Maybe you buy your local newspaper once a week, so add on another £1, multiply by 52 weeks and you get to around £327.60 a year. Then you maybe contribute to crowdfunders for your favourite new media blogs, or even subscribe/just contribute regularly, once or twice a year. Call it a conservative estimate of another £42.40, just to make the figures a bit easier to work with, making it £372 a year. That’s around £31 you already spend on subscribing to journalism, and some of it still comes loaded with advertising.

Imagine instead if the data, the stories were licensed to each publication. They could be distributed to other news sources, to newsfeed apps for license fees and subscriptions. Maybe you don’t like every writer in the National. Newsfeed apps could filter based on writer, so you could only get Kevin McKenna’s column or Cat Boyd’s. The same could apply to other news sources, magazines, niche interests. It is possible to imagine a situation where your news is genuinely personalised, not targeted through advertising, curated and chosen by you for you. And not a whiff of advertising anything else to you as you consume. Would you pay, say £15-20 a month for that service?

If local news services could be delivered through licensed distribution of data and information and some local newsgathering, at local source, say, oh I don’t know, through something like Kiltr WiFi, circumventing the big data hogs, do you think it would be something desirable?

Or would you rather take to the local Facebook page and have a moan about the failing numbers of the local newpaper, or rant on Twitter or your own Facebook feed about the preponderance of fake news? Wouldn’t it be a far more pleasing and proactive prospect (as we move past the absurdities of the British based media landscape and the democratic deficits it reinforces, as we scorn the outrageous reporting from the national broadcaster of local election results in Scotland) to imagine and move towards a reinvigorated digital media landscape, with say 2-3 million Scots subscribing to digital journalism with integrity re-established, supported by a genuinely progressive provision and infrastructure for smart communities, at around that same rate a month?

When the bitter hacks of the dying dead tree press fail to adapt and we all bemoan the death of journalism, we should declaim journalism is dead and long live journalism. We make sense of our world by telling and listening to stories. Our stories are driven by information, data and it has become the world’s most precious resource. And we’ve been fooled into giving it away for free just for another dopamine hit of social media, or to buy stuff we don’t really need (or certainly not on demand, like yesterday) to impress people we don’t really know or like. Shouldn’t we just put a paywall round it and own up to the cost?

The word is good, its just the code its written in, the language its spoken through isn’t always. 

The Scottish Enlightenment was driven by a democratised intellect and thriving publishing houses feeding it with revolutionising ideas, as opposed to the salons, the talking shops of the rest of Europe which served a similar function among a much less democratically educated elite. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution bites harder, ushering in the fourth era of digital journalism, which quite rightfully should tell the stories of its progress, draw a narrative from the endless data it produces, the foundations are laid for Scotland to be in its vanguard. We can stand on the frontlines, with simple paywalls ringfencing loyalty, trust, community and quality journalism, marking them out as trenches, battlelines in the war for reality.

Like the English language, like any words, data, any code, only has power in how it is used, how the best obtainable version of the truth is arrived at through it. In the coming battles for our rights to determine that, will you realise how much it has cost you thus far and dip your hand in your pocket? Or will you let the new playground bullies keep doing it for you?