Coming Changes to the World Wide Web

Insight from the author of ‘A History of the Internet and the Digital Future'

Competitive Creativity

Countries slow to benefit from the industrial age may have better fortunes in the digital era. In the past, nations needed ore in their hills, a good geographical location, strong armies, etc. to prosper. In the digital age one thing only is key: talented, entrepreneurial individuals.

But to achieve this, governments must inculcate digital instincts through farsighted educational reform, promoting revolutionary talent early in life, and producing a generation capable of competing with their global peers. Digital instincts are a foundation of basic digital skills in young children that allow them to adapt easily to new technologies as they emerge.

The barriers to entry are so low—cloud computing, cheap equipment, new services—that more and more micro-entrepreneurs, relying on fewer resources and acting at a younger age, will introduce commercially viable innovations and content to the global market. This is no longer the preserve of rich countries.

Changes in Media

Media is moving from push (e.g. broadcast TV) to pull (download via YouTube, Netflix, and iTunes). This allows audience members to view what they want, from where they want, when they want. As a result, mainstream TV will begin to decline and the popular audience will fragment into niches.

So far, so good. But, as media becomes dominated by niches and moves farther from the mainstream, its content producers will be increasingly at the mercy of their niche audiences. These niche audiences are likely, by virtue of their pronounced tastes, to be sophisticated and demanding viewers.

Most importantly, the economics of this new media model mean that the more niche an item of media content is, the narrower its revenue stream and the more the content producer will have to listen to the preferences of the audience. I call this “extruded media” because audience members will not only be pulling, but pulling and shaping media according to their own preferences.

This means that we will see a major change over the next decade. Will the result be populist pantomime, or a cultural renaissance, or both?

Saving the Music Industry

Piracy is killing the music industry, and it shows no sign of abating. The recent IRMA-UPC decision in the High Court is a sign of that.

I wrote in BusinessWeek in 2010 that the Internet offers salvation to the music industry, but only if it is willing to undergo a total change and merge with elements of the computer game industry.

At the same time as the music industry’s revenues collapsed, the computer game industry had become a multibillion dollar business. Whereas music can be pirated, the most popular computer games use a subscription model that is immune to piracy.

By making music a participatory thing, where subscribers perform—think something more sophisticated than “Guitar Hero”—the music industry can harness the enormous value of their back catalogue in a way that cannot be pirated and that would bring cultural benefit.

iWar

Attacks on Web services will become an increasingly grave threat as we embrace the Internet to deliver services, to communicate with friends and family, and to run our societies. This “iWar” will proliferate quickly and can be waged by anyone with an Internet connection who can follow simplified online instructions.

The trend of increasing vulnerability, coupled with the convenience and deniability of attack, is likely to result in a conflagration of iWar waged by individuals, communities, corporations, nations, and alliances.

As the Internet becomes what the high seas were in the 19th century, a global commons for communication and trade, it is also increasingly prone to piracy—and privateering by states. This is a major threat to the medium’s future.

Business

The Internet is starting to turn the conventions of business on their head. These conventions were originally established by Frederick Taylor, the inventor of what we now know as management consulting at the beginning of the last century.

Taylor was trying to systematize and standardize how industrial tasks were performed. The problem was that the work force at that time had been trained as artisans, learning by word of mouth and apprenticeship, rather than through standardized training programs. Each workman had a unique way of performing his craft.

Taylor realized that the new factories of the industrial revolution required standard ways of performing very specific, limited tasks in a very clearly defined way. This reduced workers to virtual automatons and empowered the management classes with the knowledge and control necessary to run large factories more efficiently. Phrases like “best practice” were invented.

In the post dot com era, however, the rules are reverting to the preindustrial system. The disjointed, varied wisdom of employees was no longer a threat to management. The lowest atomic unit of effective creativity within an organization became the individual employee, not the unit, or the division.

Companies would prosper or fail on the strength of their employees’ initiative and how well superiors could leverage the wisdom of their workforce. This is embodied in Google’s 70:20:10 rule that allows workers a third of their time to work on side projects largely at their own discretion.

Rather than the mass labor of the factory, this is a reversion to the craft worker applying his or her own characteristics and talents to individual tasks. Workers at smart companies are becoming artisans again, but digital ones.