Mash-up

In the year of our Lord 2007, I built a library. Indeed, I built two. One of them, a professional library, was built into an office where I carry out the pleasant business of penning novels, essays and columns. The other was a formal library – nothing more or less.

In the professional library, I can bend over and ponder a brightly coloured tangle of cables and sockets. Some bring the world to my desktop via a high-speed internet connection; others use a local area network to spread that connectivity throughout the house. On the glowing cluster of huge, power-hungry screens that dominate most of the tabletop real estate at one end of my workbench, you may find up to a dozen windows open. Meanwhile, in the media room above, a small tower of web-connected gaming consoles, a dedicated server and a Foxtel iQ box occasionally reach down to share files with the computer on which I’m working.

The formal library, in contrast, has none of this. Occupying the centre of the original house, its one nod to modernity is a rather groovy white lampshade hanging in the centre of the room. The vast and intricate web of optical fibre and wiring, which forms a sort of nervous system for the rest of the house, courses around this one space like water around a rock. Previously, it had been little more than a second lounge room. People tended to pass through the library-to-be on their way somewhere else, somewhere more interesting – like the media room. But the re-appearance of so many old friends – locked away in storage for so long – now displayed as they were meant to be, in a towering wall of hardbacks, paperbacks, quartos and dense, regimented ranks of magazines, somehow re-vivified that previously transitory and redundant space.

Of all the dying forms of modern media, the book is the oldest and, after newspapers, is often regarded as being in the most precarious of states. But there is life in the old forms yet and with that life, real power. The atomisation of all media, thanks to the irreversible shift from the old, hard, analogue means of communication to ephemeral digital versions, is a process only accelerated by the global recession. Much power is at stake, both commercial and cultural, as once-dominant media empires face the threat of annihilation. And since these empires are empires of the mind – having established TV networks, venerable newspapers and publishing houses, less venerable movie studios and totally non-venerable (but very wealthy) recording labels – it is natural that we grasp for metaphor when trying to understand their fate. But whether the appropriate metaphorical image to be applied is the arrival of moveable type – which was truly paradigm-changing – or, say, the emergence of commercial radio – which was not – remains an unsettled question.

The invention of the printing press is often cited, with good cause, as exemplifying the ability of new information technologies not only to tear down and remake existing power structures, but also to change the way human thought is structured. This invention broke the stranglehold of the medieval Church – with its monopoly on the manuscript – over the transmission of information through space and time. It is understandable that anyone whose interests are entwined with the fate of the mass media might be drawn to the apocalyptic attraction of such a comparison. Other appropriate analogies, however, lie closer in time. During the 1920s and 1930s, nearly as much end-of-days hysteria (at least in the established media) attended the rise of broadcast radio as now swirls around issues of piracy, digital-rights management, the parasitism of Google and the collapsing business models of long-established media empires.

As Jack Shafer from the online magazine Slate pointed out in August this year, the battle between radio and newspapers in the decades following the Great War anticipated many of the issues now reaching flashpoint between old and new media operators. Just as a phalanx of newspapermen and their owners have recently taken up sword and shield against news-aggregators like Google and Gawker for stealing their product, newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s were enraged by the “unauthorised use” of their content on air. And just as today’s contentions over IP rights are taking on a distinct air of jihad, the earlier “crusade” against radio:

… often lapsed into full-scale disparagement of the new media. Some print journalists and industry leaders claimed that radio content was inaccurate, skimpy, sensationalist, and trivial and that its practitioners were amateurs. When radio news was accurate, they asserted, it was either a bunch of headlines from a newspaper or a story directly pilfered from one.

Shafer asks drolly, “Does any of this sound familiar?”

It does, but not just because history has come roaring back into the present to repeat itself. The same category of trespasses informed the publishing industry’s recent confrontation with Google over the issue of the search-giant’s plans to publish the text of millions of out-of-print (but not necessarily out-of-copyright) books; the prosecution and jailing of the Pirate Bay administrators in Sweden for enabling copyright violation across a range of media; the cannibalisation of the music industry by sites such as Napster, and its eventual conquest and subjugation by Apple’s iTunes store; and the plans of media megasaurs such as Rupert Murdoch to erect fortress-like ‘pay walls’ around their properties to protect them from poaching by the likes of Google News.

It is not so long ago that the most buzzing of buzzwords surrounding old and new media was ‘convergence’: the idea that all systems of communication were inexorably gathering around a single platform that would ultimately be controlled by a handful of overlords. Time Warner’s merger with AOL and Telstra’s once-mooted takeover of Fairfax were, respectively, a consequence and a fantasy of this imagined convergent future. But only five years later – Telstra cancelled its plans to become a diverse-media company in early 2004 – ‘atomisation’ may be the more appropriate motif.

Fairfax’s share-price collapse is emblematic of a media sector in free fall. For all the public woe of Australia’s media giants, though, they are the very picture of health compared with their peers overseas, where the collapse and disintegration of established media businesses is accelerating. Fairfax’s reported loss of $380 million last financial year – on top of a rolling series of massive redundancies – might seem less than brag-worthy, but the house of Fairfax is cruising in comparison to, say, the New York Times, whose mountain of debt was reduced to junk status last year; or the Tribune Company (publishers of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times), which has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US. Writing in the Atlantic in January, Michael Hirschorn quoted the former New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal saying that he couldn’t imagine a world without the Times. Perhaps, Hirschorn quipped somewhat grimly, we should start. At that stage, there was a small but very real possibility that the Times could cease to exist as early as May.