Almost three years ago, I wrote an article for Median Strip magazine called The New Electricity. I developed some ideas from it about six months later here on this blog, but it’s just been bubbling away at the back of my mind ever since.
Essentially, there are two main ideas to that piece. The first is that the internet is not a medium, but an enabling technology. It seems a pedantic point, but it’s an important one to consider when thinking about the impact or development of online technologies.
The second is that you make advances by design thinking rather than by features thinking. More on that in a moment.
It came back into my head after messing around with the Phillips Streamium SL50i that I’ve been trying out after some 4 hours of wi-fi setup assistance from Spoons, the magical present-dispensing technician.
Aside: the screen still bugs the hell out of me.
Note to Phillips: don’t give me the same remote that comes with the video media server, you morons – just a few buttons on the front of the box will do if I can’t read the display from further than an arms length away…
Okay – so the idea of the article works like this:
Radio is a medium. Electricity is an enabling technology.
Books are a medium. Print is an enabling technology. It’s a fairly simple distinction.
So, the web is a medium. Email is a medium. The internet is an enabling technology.
Therefore… if you think of the internet as simply a medium to compete with radio or television, you’re immediately stuck in a frame that only allows you to consider it in certain ways.
It’s the reason web radio is so poor, on the whole. Radio station managers tend to think of it as a cross between a bigger transmitter and a glossy brochure – which is a very limited use of the potential of the internet for audio.
If the internet is the new electricity, we can start to imagine new appliances to plug into it. If you want to deliver audio content online, a web browser can do it – but it may not be the only appliance you can use for that purpose – or, for that matter, the best one.
You can dry your hair with a toaster if you really want to – but there are devices that do it better.
Here’s the design vs features part. You can add features to any appliance. I have a phone that also works as a calculator and as an alarm clock. Those are extra features. However, I find that a phone is not the best calculator. That might be a feature – but it’s not what the device was designed to do. An actual calculator on the other hand…
Better yet, imagine scissors. They are a triumph of design. Can you imagine any device having a scissors feature that would be even remotely useful? Have you ever tried those Swiss Army knife ones?
Now – stay with me here – jump to podcasting. Podcasting software is not a feature of any particular web browser – it’s a software appliance that plugs into the internet. It’s designed to fulfil a particular function: to deliver time-shifted audio content to your mp3 player on a subscription basis.
And so back to the streamium box. This is a device that sits on top of your stereo and pulls content from the internet via wi-fi through an application installed on your home PC. Again – not a webpage with an extra feature, but a whole new appliance.
It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. As design goes, there are flaws – but this is more or less exactly what I had in mind when I imagined this back in 2002: something that uses the internet’s strengths to deliver audio.
One thing that really stands out from that blog post:
Let’s start instead from first principles. Four questions: What do people want from us? What can we provide them? How best to do that? What’s in it for us?
These were questions I thought the radio industry should be considering in the light of new technologies (and I’m particularly – though not exclusively – talking about commercial radio here).
Instead, the questions the radio industry have been asking seem to be: What do we perceive as a threat? How do we insulate ourselves from these perceived threats?
Which is more or less the same way the music industry’s been thinking: “How can we preserve the way we do things and protect ourself from the threat of change?”
That sort of protectionist thinking has led to what Wired is (perhaps prematurely – but not entirely inaccurately) calling ‘The End of Radio’.
It’s a fairly predictable result – not of some inexorable march of progress (this ‘end’ is entirely survivable) – but of a stubborn and wilful ignorance about media environments and media shift. It’s a refusal to learn from history, a basic lack of willingness to accept things as they are and adapt to change – and it’s sign of worse to come for both the radio and corporate record industries.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
