The Visible Hand: Money, Markets and Media Evolution By David Abrahamson Northwestern University FROM: Abrahamson, David. "The Visible Hand: Money, Markets and Media Evolution." In Journalism Quarterly (1998): in submission. It may be an act of unpardonable hubris to attempt to conflate the Immortal Bard and the ethereal Internet in the same paragraph, but, as in so many matters of the human condition, Shakespeare was of course correct: What's past is, indeed, prologue.[1]. And if that be true, my methodological premise -- to ask if it might be worthwhile to look to the past to find models that would suggest the future evolution of this amorphous thing we call the Internet -- has, I think, proved unusually fruitful. Upon reflection, at least two interesting historical cases can, I would argue, serve as possible models. The first is the evolution of magazines in two separate periods, the late Nineteenth Century as well as the 1960s. The second is broadcasting in the period after World War II. Both of these forms of old media -- magazines and broadcasting -- are germane for different reasons. Magazines may serve as an evolutionary model for the Internet because, even though they, unlike newspapers, typically serve national markets, they are characterized by the specificity of both the information they contain and the audiences they serve. They are generally not geographically limited, and, rather than serving some admittedly essential purpose such as the daily dissemination of news, they provide other kinds of more segmented, higher-value information to their readers.[2] Broadcasting, too, may be germane in comparison to any examination of the Internet, also for a pair of reasons. It is a medium that not only has its origins in a significantly advanced technology, but the role of evolving technology has remained fundamental to its continuing evolution. Secondly, governmental involvement, in the form of regulatory and technology policy, has had a pivotal role in the evolution of broadcasting for its first 50 years of existence. But before examining the historical past of magazines and broadcasting in detail for clues to how the Internet might evolve, perhaps there would be value in a categorical statement of those matters which will not be a part of my central thesis: The future of the Internet will have nothing to do with how credit card numbers are given out, not given out, encrypted, or decrypted for security purposes. It will have nothing to do with the speeds of modems, issues related to bandwidth or whether or not cable television companies will be able to deliver what now takes 30 seconds to your home computer screen instantaneously.[3] This may be regarded as a somewhat contrarian notion, but it will have nothing to do with any of the ideologically libertarian arguments that have characterized much of the discourse about the Internet in the last ten years. As we know, that discourse includes terribly seductive precepts; one of my favorites is the notion that "The information itself wants to be free." I do not think so. And that notion can perhaps serve as an appropriate segue to the essence of my central proposition -- and that is that, simply put, it will not be free. Concomitantly, I would argue that the process of defining the future of the Internet will, in both the generality and the particular, be essentially market-driven. In support of this thesis, I would like to offer five speculations about the future of the Internet, each accompanied and illustrated -- but, to be careful with our logic, not of course actually proven -- with historical analogs. First, though the forms and cost structure have yet to be determined, it seems certain that the Internet will evolve in ways that make it possible for a major portion of it to be supported by advertising. Like the creation of the national commercial model in magazine publishing in the late 1890s by Cyrus Curtis and the Curtis Publishing Company, with its flagship publications Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, it is clear that a more fully realized and more commercially effective advertising-supported model will evolve.[4] It is likely that online advertising will move well beyond the current trade practices of banners at the top of the page and those intrusive blinking buttons and lights at the bottom of the screen. As an aside, it will be very interesting to see just how intrusive the advent of new forms of advertising on the Internet will be. The medium itself will have to mediate between the attention-getting needs of advertisers for ever more glaring and insistent commercial entities and possible reader disaffection with the intrusion. No one at this point quite knows how such matters will in practice be worked out, but the process will no doubt be interesting to watch. A second major speculation is that the Internet will continue to evolve informationally in the principal direction it has for the last five years. It will, to an ever greater degree, continue to be transformed into a vehicle for the provision of very specific high-value information to very specific high- consumption audiences. It will move from what now might be characterized as a mass-market vehicle to one which provides "niche" information. The historical model for this is the revolution in the world of consumer magazines that occurred in the 1960s. It was a time when magazine publishing became segmented, moving from large mass-market publications like Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post to smaller, more fractionated, better targeted publications with smaller circulations serving smaller, more specific readerships. Though driven primarily by an interest on the part of advertisers in smaller, more elite, audiences, the medium itself was certainly a co- conspirator, because the delivery of such audiences could be priced at premium levels that the advertisers were willing to pay. As a result, with lower production costs and greater revenues, from the magazines' perspective it made a great deal of economic sense. My guess is that the Internet, too, will fractionate in this way. An interesting related element to watch will be a likely change in the nature and form of "domain names." Right now, as we all know, ".com" ("dot- com" in OnlineSpeak) is the overarching domain name given all commercial entities. It is likely that more specific signposts will be available in the names themselves; that is, in the format of the Universal Resource Locator (URL) address. The benefit will be that it will provide more detailed directions to audiences regarding the kind of information that is available at a particular site. It will be, one imagines, not unlike a magazine newsstand, where there is a women's service section and a hobby magazine section and a financial publication section. The commercial arguments in favor of such URL address differentiation seem so persuasive, I can find no reason to believe that this sort of differentiation will not take place.[5] My third speculation is that the role of government in the evolution of the Internet will, quite deliberately, be diminished. This is to say that the government will continue to proceed with what might be called its self- marginalization. Though the government had a fundamental role in the origins of the Internet as a Pentagon adjunct, I think its role will contract, and it will largely relegate itself to concern with principally cultural issues: pornography, protection of children, and the like. The change will be not unlike the shift we have seen over the last 50 years in television and broadcasting. In the first 25 years of television immediately after W.W.II, the government acted in a far more activist -- some would argue intrusive -- capacity vis a vis television, while in the last 25 years its role has steadily declined.[6] A notable aspect of this change will be that the sense of ownership itself of the Internet will undergo a transformation. Despite its Defense Department origins, the Internet will less and less be viewed as a public utility and, unavoidably, greater portions of it will, in name as well as effect, be privatized. Two particulars of this will be interesting to watch: (a) the role to be played by Microsoft, by far the largest player at the nation's information technology table and a commercial enterprise with well documented monopolistic appetites, and (b) the public reaction to the specifics of the further privatization of the Internet -- what will happen when, just as portions of the national transportation highway net have been privatized in the last decade, toll booths are erected on the information highway? A fourth speculation focuses on the centripetal dynamic of media evolution. At least in the short- and mid-term, there will be significantly heightened levels of economic concentration in the entities that provide information on the Internet. Like both magazine publishing and broadcasting since the 1970s, fewer and fewer, and larger and larger, companies will command with ever greater shares of market. Once again, it is quite possible that the Microsoft model will pertain -- but in this instance not about software but about the Internet itself. If this predicted concentration does indeed take place, one aspect that will certainly bear observation is cultural. The Internet as we know it today is uniquely suited to entrepreneurial behavior. Is there anyone without a friend or former student who has set up her own web design shops in a loft in San Francisco or Boston or Boulder? As the corporatization takes place due to concentration, it will be interesting to see what happens to the small Internet-related shops that exist now. Will they merge? Will they be subsumed? Will they be replaced by additional future waves of entrepreneurial activity, perhaps at the margin of shores that do not even exist today? My fifth and last point of speculation about the Internet's future is simply to underscore something we all know -- and that is that we know nothing. It is not possible, I would argue, for anyone to predict the scope and/or effect of something as profound as the Internet. It can perhaps be usefully compared to speculation in the 1940s about the advent of television. "Radio with pictures," some called it. Today, it is hard to imagine a more profound influence than television on the nation's social, political, or cultural life, and yet very few people who foresaw such far-reaching effects. Using television as an example, I can imagine future historians studying its evolution during the 20th Century and identifying key moments, historical fulcrums, that in retrospect clearly moved society in new directions. Large significance will be attached to moments such as the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates that proved the paradigm-warping political power of television to many. It may seem silly to suggest today, but perhaps those future historians will accord the 1980 founding of MTV a significant historical moment. We do not as yet know the exact effects of MTV, but certainly there is a vast cultural importance to it worth documenting. Which leaves a final question we might, as journalism educators, ask ourselves: Amid all this speculation -- and, as I hope I have underscored with sufficient zeal, it is only that -- what does the Internet and its future evolution mean to us? The answer, I suspect lies in the simple acts of remaining interested, examining, involved, and participating -- as teachers, scholars and journalists. It is already likely that the emergence of the Internet will prove to be what historians term a world-historical event. And if it is possible that at least part of our nation's future will in some way be affected by the evolution of the Internet, then perhaps it is fitting that, as both educators and citizens, we should accept the challenge of participating in helping to shape that future in the best interests of our students, journalism in general and the country as a whole. [1] William Shakespeare, "The Tempest," II.(261): Dialog file 175, item 00011759. [2] For a full explication of the historical origins of this segmentation in the periodical industry, see David Abrahamson, Magazine-Made America: The Cultural Transformation of the Postwar Periodical (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1996). [3] This concern with the technological aspects of media evolution is an almost-constant, but somewhat misguided, preoccupation of the popular consumer-computer magazines; e.g. see article by David Aubrey, "Bandwith Blues," Computer Shopper, February 1997, the full text of which is available at: http://www5.zdnet.com/cshopper/content/9702/cshp0038.html. [4] Though somewhat dated in its approach, the best telling of the Curtis story remains James Playstead Wood's The Curtis Magazines (New York: Roland Press, 1971). [5] At present the assignment of URL addresses, as well as domain names, is the province of a quasi-governmental, not-for-profit entity based in Reston, Virginia with no policy functions. As of late 1997, the move for more differentiation in URL addresses was still only being tentatively discussed in Washington technology policy circles. [6] My own sense is that it would be a mistake to regard the impulse behind this widespread de-regulatory reflex as a partisanly political one, reversible in the near future. The level of support for such policies across most of the political spectrum is a testament to its broad appeal to a large majority of the electorate. Copyright 1997 David Abrahamson. All rights reserved.