A Reality Check for Electronic Media

My shtick has always been that the Internet is not a media business, that does not however mean that it is not an effective, potentially devastating competitor for our attention and resources. This piece from the Guardian spells it out in stark detail/

I have just spent two days at another media conference. This one was organised by the Financial Times, and if the Guardian conference was from Venus, the FT's was from Mars. The topics under discussion were no less interesting or important, but they were much more scary. The broadcasting world described at this conference was a brutal one, characterised by a collapsing audience share, an unending advertising slump, attrition from competing platforms and, worst of all, an increasingly hostile and uninterested audience. Now, things are all about survival.

When something comes along that offers something close to genuine control of content by the recipient, the ability to create and interact with others and be stimulated (OK, insert porn joke here) by that interaction, the dull mindless rubbish on TV will swiftly take a back seat. Big deal, it wont go away, any more than TV replaced newspapers or radio, but in passing its Hubbert Peak, it will slide down the slope of our attention economy, and that's the deal. Welcome to the future, it just happened.