The Medium is the Maelstrom

As a financial professional working for large media companies over the past two decades, I’ve witnessed first-hand one of the most gut-wrenching transformations of any business sector.  At the core of this has been the emergence of transformative technologies that have changed the way we live.  While the transformation  continues to accelerate, we can carefully take a step back and attempt to comprehend this media evolution utilizing the frameworks of media theorists such as Marshall Mcluhan.  Mcluhan studied media evolution from the invention of the alphabet in ancient times, to the age of the printing press about 2,500 years later, to the emergence of industrial media technologies in the early part of the 20^th century and culminating with the dominance of television driving the “Global Village” at the time of his death in 1980.  In suggesting an approach to understanding the effects of media, McLuhan referred to Edgar Alan Poe’s  A Descent into the Maelstrom, a short story in which a sailor survives the forces of a catastrophic whirlpool by studying the objects floating around him and understanding the nature of the currents.   As much as Mcluhan dissected the acceleration of these changes over several centuries, I’m sure he would still have been stunned by recent history.  Let’s consider that few of us had internet connections 20 years ago and Google and Facebook are less than 15 years in the making.  While traditional media companies and global ad agencies struggle, the lower half of Manhattan is now flourishing with  hundreds of media startups that promise transformative communication experiences including gaming, precision marketing, advertising immersion and instant product development.  How can we create models and metaphors that can get us ahead of the curve?

THE FRAMEWORK

Let’s explore what drives media evolution under these conditions, incorporating the insights of McLuhan and other media theorists. First, a challenge to a traditional medium by a new medium will create competition. This is harmless while the emerging medium is in its early stage, and the traditional medium modestly gains by simply leveraging its content on the new medium or using it as a tool within its larger framework. Eventually, the upstart gains momentum and creates innovations on a large scale that become more threatening. The traditional medium will need to evolve into something more engaging in order to retain its old audience or grow new ones. The most successful survivors often transform themselves by utilizing the most relevant features of their new media challengers or the new media environment, finding within them new opportunities. They will create a more powerful “ratio of the senses,” a unique synesthesia, that engage audiences through the extension, repression and rebalancing of sight, sound, touch, and/or intellectual insight (those that simply recycle the content of another medium will rarely succeed). And the new mediums can’t simply destroy the old out of hand; they often need their content to develop and expand. If the environment can retain a healthy level of symbiosis with new media driving traditional media to innovate while new media finds powerful ways to leverage traditional media content, major advances can be achieved in human experience and profitability. But the ability to create and retain symbiosis is influenced by the acceleration introduced by new media. If change occurs too drastically, disequilibrium occurs where new media gains at a phenomenal rate as traditional media collapses. Seeking to find remnants of its lost audience, traditional media may revert to satisfy base and even dark forces. Or it may shrink to satisfy a more specialized audience, remaining true to its nature at a much smaller scale.  Let’s apply this framework to the development of an early 20th century media transformation.  Then we’ll attempt to bring this learning into the modern whirlpool.  

1890s TO 1950s   - VAUDEVILLE TO THE INTEGRATED MUSICAL

Vaudeville, a variety-oriented mix of music and comedy, became the main form of mass entertainment as the 19th Century turned into the 20th. One of its great impresarios, Florenz Ziegfield, would rise from his success at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago to transform the medium. As Stefan Kanfer states in the City Journal, vaudeville “was the most democratic popular art in American history.” While one might consider these purely visual experiences, these were more in line with the tactile, audio tradition involving audience interaction. Like all forms of media, vaudeville evolved from raw, rough-edged beginnings. The audience would be encouraged to dance, laugh, boo and throw their groceries at intentionally bad acts, often while imbibing alcohol.  

Vaudeville dominated until the emergence of new media form, cinema.  In its nascent stage, cinema was shown on small machines in nickelodeon parlors and took the form of one brief act in a list of features in a vaudeville show. Vaudeville initially swallowed cinema into its framework but in a matter of years cinema would devour vaudeville. Its temperature as a medium heated up quickly as it evolved from the novelty of “actualities” to the fascination of story-telling, assisted by the techniques of close-ups, irises, and associative editing.  It was also more economical for consumers and entrepreneurs to engage in the exchange of film rather than the higher cost of live entertainment. So what happened to vaudeville? The force of new media pressured it to evolve into something more engaging – spectacular shows with more elegant staging, costumes, and more polished talent that commanded higher prices. Ziegfeld created his famous “Follies” revue in 1907, named after a newspaper column called “Follies of the Day.” This was a variety show with a magic ratio of music, comedy, dance and beauty that lasted for over two decades.

The next major threat arrived about a decade later in the form of sound. Radio at first was considered a novelty as well and recording devices were primitive and expensive. The musicians writing and playing for vaudeville served a subservient role within the vaudeville/revue framework, merely supporting the stars of the medium that sang and danced to their melodies. Live vaudeville and revues modestly gained at first from radio and records by featuring its stars within the new mediums. But once sound technologies in the form of radio and phonographs enable mass consumption, music in its own right became an elevated art form,  creating another rebalancing of the ratios.   Let’s take the case of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and the team of Rodgers and Hart.   Writing for vaudeville shows, Gershwin generated songs that grew virally into hits with the assistance of radio and records. He was a pioneer in the mashing together of several musical forms; ragtime, jazz, classical, dance,  aided by the proliferation of sound made available be recorded music. Jerome Kern was a trailblazer who believed that the “book” could drive the musical revue into a coherent form rather than be subservient to melody and dance. Richard Rodgers and his lyricist partner Lorenz Hart, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, aspired to create more witty, satirical shows known as intimate revues.

Now that the more immediate aspects of live music and comedy were supplanted by radio, intensifying the pressure already exerted by cinema, vaudeville-driven live entertainment again needed to become more engaging. As composers like Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers and Cole Porter grew in prestige through the expansion of sound technology, they were empowered to rise from their subservient role within the vaudeville/revue format.  Working closely with their lyricists, the written word would assist melody in creating a more powerful cultural force.  By the late twenties, the American story-driven musical was born with breakthrough shows like Strike Up the Band composed by George Gershwin and Showboat, composed by Jerome Kern and produced by Florenz Ziegfield. By this time, the visionary Ziegfield had realized that his standard formula of melody, spectacle, beauty and dance could no longer stand out in a world dominated by movies and sound. In 1931, Gershwin’s musical Of Thee I Sing with a book by George S. Kaufman would become the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Let’s consider that a Pulitzer is usually an honor granted to creators of plays and novels. Its bestowment on Gershwin and Kaufman is a testament to how the integrated musical was driven by a shift in ratio to the written word.  

And then another breakthrough. Just as the integrated musical moved forward, movies began to talk and sing.  The ratios would rebalance again. Cinema now served vision and hearing, raising the potential for human experience. And of course the most endearing form of sound is music. From the beginning, Broadway was the content of sound cinema. The Jazz Singer  starring the vaudevillian Al Jolson and featuring many of his most renowned songs, was the first major sound film. Broadway melodramas such as Forty Second Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, as well as the Times Square centered fables of Damon Runyon were often the story lines of early talking cinema. The Broadway choreographer Busby Berkeley, a pioneer in the intersection between Broadway and Hollywood, would powerfully integrate dance, film and music by staging musical numbers that spilled off the stage into an expanded cinema space.   By the early 1930s, the silent film was essentially dead.

The power of sound cinema would now drive a rebalancing of the sense ratios inherent to the integrated musical through the 1930s and into the early 1940s.   The most successful team of this era, Rodgers and Hammerstein, were creative forces in the first integrated musicals of the 1920s. Oscar Hammerstein II, a contemporary of Lorenz Hart at Columbia, would replace him as the lyricist partner to Richard Rodgers. This team manifested itself less as a lyricist matched to a composer and more as an integrated dramatic force. There can be no doubt that the media around them had an impact. Radio had matured to become a standard in every home and swallowed live vaudeville music and comedy routines. Sound cinema had now matured to provide a more powerful ratio of the senses with more engaging story-telling (written word), cinematography (visual), character development (visual matched to written word), editing (visual/tactile) and musical score (sound). Not only were these mediums gaining cohesiveness, they were churning out content at a breakneck speed. Film historians believe 1939 was the greatest year for the American film (The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and Stagecoach to name a few of the year’s best). Television was on the horizon, growing as another media competitor in the early forties. And of course Rodgers and Hammerstein were witnesses to the evolution of light shows in Times Square over their decades of work within the district.

With Oklahoma in 1943, Rodgers and Hammerstein would achieve a more powerful ratio of the senses in live theater. The role of the written word expanded to become the dominant force; the book in Oklahoma is a fairly literal adaptation of the play Green Grow the Lilacs. Music and lyrics primarily serve the purpose of driving drama and character; the director Rouben Mamoulian articulated this as dialogue to music, or speech becoming song. The show’s score is outstanding, but it could be argued that many of Rodgers’ hits from the two preceding decades are just as endearing. However, because of the drive to create depth in story and character, his earlier work rarely comes close in emotion and mood. As Meryle Secrest stated in her biography of Richard Rodgers, Oklahoma’s power was more than just the continuing integration of song and story that had been ongoing for decades.  It created that unique synethesia:

“Oklahoma’s uniqueness stemmed from the extent to which song, dance, story, costumes, scenery, and lighting had coalesced into the kind of total theatre so often extolled in theory and so difficult to achieve in fact. As Mark Steyn wrote, ‘Rodgers and Hammerstein …fused the naturalism of the straight play, the musicality of the operetta, the color and imagery of musical comedy lyrics and the emotional sweep of dance.”
 
Going forward, musicals would continue to debut in a wide variety and intensity of sense ratios. Many will achieve success merely based on their vaudevillian mix of music and comedy while others will thrive by showcasing dance. But the most memorable achieve a powerful ratio utilizing the diverse elements of drama and music.  Let’s explore further the powerful mix of sensory stimulation in the musical West Side Story. Its literary source is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set to the gang wars of the city’s Upper West Side. Dance is an empowering motif, used to convey sexual awakening, satire in the way of gestures, and violent emotions. The grit of the streets comes alive through soaring melodies, creating a glorification of dense urban life. But it is the drive of the story, supported by these elements, that creates the depth of emotion.  

1990s  TO TODAY – EVOLUTION  OF NEWS AND ENTERTAINMENT ON THE INTERNET

 So what does West Side Story have to do with Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg?  Let’s consult the framework and the transformation of sense ratios from the dawn of the internet to today.  The commercial internet emerged in the 1990s as a novelty, a new platform to read news, exchange messages and view photos, but the technology was slow and required enormous computing power.  At first, traditional publications gained modestly with new audiences by offering their content on line for free.  When the first dotcom boom emerged, traditional media gained as internet startups paid  liberally to promote their products in print and on television. Impresarios of traditional media such as Sumner Redstone interpreted the emerging medium as a platform that they could control in their overall framework, proclaiming that “Content is King.”   With content as the driver, they could control the audience and drive it across their own integrated platforms (portal model). The late nineties  was  a period of hype and profits for traditional media benefiting from the promotion of the internet and simultaneously creating huge mergers attempting to integrate content across platforms (AOL/Time Warner, Viacom/CBS).

 In the new millennium, the internet bubble burst but the first viable enterprises of the new medium emerged.   They were based  however  upon powerful new functionality rather than content – search engines, shopping crawlers, auction sites, smart phones.  Steve Jobs emerged as the Ziegfield  of the  era, innovating new products on an extraordinary scale.  Early on, it could be argued that the migration of media forms to the internet was linear; first text, then sound, then photos, then video.  But as the speed of computing accelerated, all forms of media were swallowed rapidly as cinema had once swallowed all forms of live content.  This accelerated assimilation created a rather chaotic medley of media hybrids, one we are still coming to terms with, but no doubt has driven  a more powerful ratio of the senses for online consumers.

Despite billion dollar efforts, traditional media companies failed to work these new technologies  into their own framework.   On the contrary, internet and mobile technologies worked traditional media into their framework.  Newspapers and magazines are disassembled on the web and consumed more on the unit level rather than the as a cohesive product (the ITunes model).  Even when kept intact, they often must embed themselves in  the framework of a tech company (apps for example that take a huge cut of the profits).  The disassembly of the product commoditizes news and entertainment offerings and the playing field is blurred across long-standing publications, emerging publishers via blogs, news aggregators, and hybrid aggregator/news sites  supplementing content with inexpensive  freelance contributions.  Advertising migrates  to the web drawn by medium-specific methods that are  less expensive and more measurable (Key word advertising and ad networks).   Like cinema’s influence on live entertainment a hundred years ago, the exchange mechanism rebalances and traditional media dollars translate into digital pennies. 

Like the composer elevated from its subservient role in vaudeville/revues, the programmer/engineer is elevated from the subservient role in news and entertainment organizations. The content of publications is influenced by the enabling technology and the engineer’s role is nearly as powerful in the creative process as the journalist. 

Add to this now the rapid growth of social media and we witness another rebalancing of the sense ratios.   The integration of mass audience participation through direct content and commentary changes the landscape further into a kind of cyber-vaudeville.  Despite all the efforts to organize and control this limitless environment, we have reverted back in many ways  to a no holds barred variety show,  much like Poe’s whirlpool.  We have entered a state where tremendous amounts of information are available to us and while the content is becoming easier to navigate, it is greatly varied in quality.  We can communicate across several platforms with anyone on the globe and we can access and contribute to content wherever we go.  Hundreds of technologies are emerging in the hope of creating more order within this lumascape, but many may be increasingly disruptive as well. 

WHAT’S NEXT?

As fragmented and chaotic as the landscape now exists,   I believe  those who will best succeed will find  opportunities  to regain a higher level of  symbiosis, benefiting their own interests  and society in general.   We are already seeing this in the way content farms, entities creating fairly generic  content simply to game search results, have been conscientiously knocked down in search algorithms  for better quality content.  While Google, Facebook, Apple and a few other monoliths dominate the lumascape, their models need healthy startup technologies  and quality  content players, amateur and professional, to sustain growth.  Whether a traditional media company, new media startup or growing  technology company,  an entity should  be looking to see how it can integrate various emerging technologies, services and content into its framework.   While we will elaborate on specifics in future posts, here are some considerations:

*Weighing the ratio of text, video, photos and other content on the site to create deeper engagement.  Great content is key, but establishing a unique synesthesia will be increasingly critical in this fragmented world.  Let’s consider that once the ratio shifted to the book (plot/story)  in musicals, an intriguing story was needed to drive the song and dance.  In an opposite way today, written content  needs to acquire qualities akin to song and dance in order to better stand out.  And  ratios will need to be different based upon the nature of each varying  device.   For example, an entity may offer a certain mobile experience that drives the audience to the” theatre” of the desktop for the full experience. 

*Coming to grips with the fact that this is a world of hybrids, intersections between forms of communication, content and facilitating technologies.  Eventually the most compelling of hybrids becomes a new standard.  In its day, Gershwin’s music was considered  hybrid yet now we consider his masterpieces to exemplify the “Gershwin touch.”  Sound cinema was considered a hybrid in its early stages and many considered it a novelty of minor disruption, yet within a few years the silent film was dead.  Google at first was a cross between computing and a catalogue of websites, yet in a short time we became reliant on web search and googling became a verb.  And the I-phone was a cross between a phone, an I-pod and a computer, yet who among us can live without a smartphone now? 

*Incorporating emerging technologies quickly, preferably earlier and more effectively than  competitors.  These new technologies can be found by trawling startup news sites, attending  meetups, or hanging out at downtown coffee shops.   One may stumble upon the next engineer/impresarios heavily caffeinated and engaged on their macs.  New technologies will need traditional mediums and their content for their developmental  nutrition.  The traditional mediums need  to successfully integrate these technologies to create their unique synesthesia.  

*Integrating social media beyond comments,  links and add-ons.  Take for example the Twitter feeds that have been increasingly popping up on home pages.  Yes, they yield real-time content, but how can they be better integrated with the content on the rest of the site?  Let’s envision the audience as a drunken rambunctious group of tomato pitchers, easily able to interact with us on their terms.  We need to treat them as partners,  integrating them cohesively into the framework of our site. 

Like Zeigfeld, Gershwin and others, we should indeed look at our content offerings less as a cyber-vaudeville and more  as integrated musicals, creating powerful ratios of  sight, sound, audience participation, and intellectual stimulation at a level  that imbibes them with a musical quality.   In this way, we will bring these fragmented environments closer  to symbiosis and carry on the traditions of Zeigfeld, Gershwin, Jobs and other impresarios of transformative media.