Futurist Views of Mass Media

Overview

Mass media began more or less with the invention of the printing press34, but has principally referred to the media associated with the rise of mass media culture from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first century, particularly printed periodicals, radio and recorded music, movies, television, and internet media. Since the advent of mass media, there have always been predictions about its future, or about its effects on American culture. The simplest of these predictions have centered on a new medium “killing” an old one—with television threatening movies and radio, for instance—or on the popularity of a new medium having some detrimental effect on society. Both newspapers and smartphones, for instance, were subject to moral panics over the fear that their use was causing people to withdraw socially and avoid conversation with those around them—moral panics that transpired more than a century apart.

The greatest changes in recent media history have been experienced by television, and because many of the changes experienced there or predicted for the near future have analogues in other media, that will be the main medium addressed in this essay. The differences between television and movies are, in the twenty-first century, largely differences that exist in the industries that produce them: Americans tend to watch them both in the same place (at home and/or on portable screens), with theatrical visits the exception, and most creative personnel work in both industries. Similarly, publishing continues to undergo changes that are similar to those experienced by television and movies, as the internet and ecommerce have changed both the medium in which customers purchase books and the manner with which they find, purchase, and respond to them. The same is true of the music industry.

As cable television became more popular following its introduction in the 1970s, one of the most frequent predictions about television was that after the number of available channels ballooned, services would be available “a la carte,” replacing the tiered system of cable subscription wherein groups of channels were bundled together in tiers of pricing. When digital cable did indeed allow for hundreds of cable channels to be offered to the average subscriber, this prediction was renewed with vigor—and proven false. The fate of a la carte television channel service demonstrates one of the problems with mass media predictions that are grounded more in an understanding of technology than an understanding of media industries.

The reason a la carte channel subscriptions are not a norm—available generally only for “pay cable” channels like HBO and Showtime—is because the cable television industry developed in such a way that the survival of most of those hundreds of channels depends on the tiered subscription system. Less popular channels survive, and have the opportunity to attract new viewers and become more significant channels (as AMC and FX did in the late 2000s with the introduction of their critically acclaimed original programming), only because viewers who would not choose to pay extra for them receive them for “free” when they pay for subscription tiers. Viewers who want to watch ESPN or MTV, for example, also receive subscriptions to a dozen or more other channels—usually channels that the cable provider feels appeal to a similar demographic. There may be a “sports fan” package that includes ESPN, for instance, or because of the network’s popularity. Alternatively, a popular channel like ESPN may be part of the basic tier that includes the major channels in each category. Sometimes the tiers are arranged such that getting the most popular channels requires subscribing to most of the rest. Cable providers do not pay the same fee for every channel; ESPN, for example, is one of the more expensive. In a sense, passing on the expense of ESPN to the customer subsidizes the cost of paying for the less popular channels. This is very similar to how broadcast networks have always worked, wherein the advertising revenue accrued by the most popular shows was important not principally because it recouped the cost of producing those shows, but because it provided the funding for developing new and untried shows, or keeping certain shows on the air that were less popular but critically acclaimed or valuable in some other way. The CW’s show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, for instance, and AMC’s Rectify were two of the lowest-rated scripted shows during most of their seasons, among hundreds of shows airing the same years, but both networks retained those series and allowed them to finish out their runs because they were among the most critically acclaimed shows of the decade.

However, while a la carte cable channel subscription never materialized, the streaming services that arose as cable adjuncts and alternatives fill a similar niche—both in that they are themselves sold a la carte and because digital video services like Amazon, iTunes, and YouTube allow the purchase of television shows aired on other services, either after they have aired or even while airing. By the 2010s, “television” had become a more elastic concept, no longer referring simply to content broadcast by networks, affiliates, and independent stations over the air or to content carried by cable networks, but including serialized and episodic streaming content. While streaming services like Netflix and Hulu—and later Amazon Prime, CBS All Access, Acorn, Crackle, YouTube Red, NBC Peacock, and many others—initially carried content originally produced for other venues (including movies, documentaries, and reruns of television programming), they soon branched out into original content. This included full-length feature films, whether they were movies to which the service had simply picked up the distribution rights or movies in which the service was involved from the beginning through financing or development. Streaming services got even more attention when the original series they began to produce, including Orange is the New Black (Netflix), House of Cards (Netflix), Transparent (Amazon Prime), and The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu), began to garner serious critical acclaim and awards. By decade’s end, Netflix earned as many Emmy nominations as HBO, which had been the dominant network in television awards since The Sopranos first aired in the 1990s.

In the broadest sense, the television industry is still bound by content viewers can watch on television, but in practice many viewers are watching on smartphones, tablets, or computers, whether as an adjunct to their television set watching or—especially with younger viewers—as a replacement for it. On-demand services present a more balkanized picture than even the futurists of the 1990s, sure of the imminence of a la carte cable, predicted—one in which no television show commands ratings even approaching the ratings of a mid-list series in the twentieth century, and in which “old” television available on streaming services competes with new series airing for the first time.

Further Insights

Frequently, predictions about mass media fail because of their focus on a future form or medium that is substantially and unnecessarily different from what has come before. Predictions of newspapers “printed” on foldable LCD-like screens with animated content, for instance, were grounded reasonably in an understanding of what was technologically possible, but failed to account for the rise of portable computing in the form of smartphones, laptops, and tablet computers: no one needs to purchase an expensive disposable LCD screen newspaper every day when they can download that same content to their phone, without accumulating the waste. Furthermore, many people no longer bother paying for a source of news like a newspaper at all, because of the amount of content that is available for free on the internet. The idea of reading the news on one’s phone is, in one sense, more mundane than that of micro-thin foldable computer displays, but smartphones popularized ubiquitous computing in a remarkably short period of time, and revolutionized consumer technology and telecommunications, to a degree few people had predicted even ten years before the release of the iPhone.

Some predictions have not come to pass because no one has yet been able to develop the technology, or offer it feasibly. One of the best examples here is “smellovision,” or the broadcast delivery of olfactory sensations, especially in conjunction with television programming. This seemed like an obvious prediction to make—just as television had added visuals to the audio-only offerings of radio, smellovision would have added a third sense. The recording of sound and images, however, were technologies that were decades old at the advent of commercial television, whereas no similar advances have ever been made in the recording of scents. Furthermore, it is difficult to see what would justify the expense of finding a way to add smell to a television program.

Other predictions correctly foresaw the possibility of a technology but overestimated audience interest in it. 3D television stalled not because the technology was too difficult but because no one was especially interested in it. The addition of sound or video to traditional text-based media like newspapers, books, or magazines is not considered to add enough value to be worth pursuing, especially with internet access providing the same combination of content types online. Virtual reality (VR) was predicted to make the internet seem old-fashioned and obsolete—in 1993, before the internet had even had its heyday. Twenty-five years later, in 2018, consumer-level VR sets were still nowhere near achieving the immersion that had been predicted in the 1990s. The real barrier to VR becoming more than a novelty (aside from motion sickness, a significant barrier to 3D media as well) may be simply that so many of its functions are offered by other media. Augmented reality games, in particular, can be played with nothing but a smartphone or tablet, and wearable forms of augmented reality offer much of the same appeal as the VR that is possible in the early twenty-first century, raising the question of why consumers should bother investing in more expensive and less-supported equipment.

The smartphone and the internet are probably the best emblems of what twentieth century forecasters misunderstood about the future. In both cases, an already ubiquitous technology offered a new vector for mass media: when smartphones were introduced, everyone already owned a telephone, and cellular phones were on their way to ubiquity. The telephone had not been considered seriously as a medium for delivered content since the early twentieth century, when it had been used as a way to deliver sound in a more cumbersome fashion than the radio that would soon eclipse it for that purpose. Adding internet access, video, and portability made content delivery all but inevitable. The internet, similarly, was not originally envisioned as a mass medium, at least not in the sense that it has developed. Nor was it adopted as rapidly as the smartphone. Once this once-novelty service became ubiquitous, however, it became the delivery medium for media of all types, from ebooks and plain text news stories to VR. The sophistication, cost, and complication of the internet would make this seem like an unsupportable prediction, had it been made in the 1960s: how could using this much hardware, both at the consumer end and in the infrastructure, be more appealing that individually distributing music, movies, television, games, and news in different dedicated channels? But because infrastructure investments were initially made without the consumer in mind, and because internet access spread for reasons other than these uses to which it was eventually put, it was practical, convenient, and profitable for services to begin offering music (iTunes, Spotify), movies (Netflix, Amazon), television (Hulu), radio (Pandora, Sirius), and everything else.

Issues

The future of mass media is likeliest to be more media. That is to say: television expanded into numerous channels, many of which are not “television” channels in the traditional sense, until such point that it is no longer physically possible for even a professional critic to watch all the new television shows released in a season. The result has been a specialization of television production and packaging: hour-long dramas about troubled antiheros abound, but there is just as much television produced in the genre of competition-based cooking shows, all-ages animation with sophisticated characterization and arc-based plotting, sports coverage and commentary, and home improvement. This is not to say there is “something for everyone”: as reports by industry watchdog groups note every year, television programming remains disproportionately white and male, but the diversity of programming is significantly greater than in past generations. So too for other media: the ebook and print-on-demand markets have allowed many self-published authors to find success, something that was true for only a rare handful of authors in the past. Fan communities have flourished and made it easier for audiences to find the entertainment that suits them. Music stars are even discovered on YouTube and other services.

The key to massive media is navigation. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, recommendation engines and other algorithm-driven software have been used to “surface” content for online or app-using audiences. It is impossible to browse all the books sold on Amazon, neither is it possible to browse all the movies and television shows on Netflix. Instead, interfaces for both services list a small selection of popular choices—recent releases and bestsellers, for instance—and user choice from that point dictates the content likeliest to be shown to the user. Once the service has built a sufficiently deep profile of the user’s interests, that profile influences search engine results as well as browsing; Amazon will hazard a guess that the cookbook-loving user who types in “Cuban” is more likely looking for a Cuban cookbook than a travel guide or rumba CD.

Some commentators believe that this personalized media diet will in the future no longer be service-specific. When a viewer turns on his set-connected device or tablet computer in order to look for something to watch, the user has to open Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Prime, YouTube, and cable television subscriptions separately, browsing and searching each individually. Front-end services could integrate these subscriptions just as cable boxes integrated cable channels or Yahoo and Google provided search engines for the World Wide Web: a future viewer may turn on his TV, tell their voice-activated remote “find a dark but funny drama I haven’t watched yet,” and the television will surface a show the viewer is determined likely to enjoy based on their previous viewing habits, independent of which service that show is associated with.

What will make that possible is revenue. Most mass media in the past has been sold on a simple basis: when you bought a book or a record, you exchanged cash for physical media that you owned in perpetuity. Television and radio were sold differently: customers bought the device used to access programming, and programming was paid for by advertisers rather than viewers. The internet functions in largely the same way, but marketing has become more sophisticated. The technology used to access media offers a significant source of revenue: personal data about buying habits, political preferences, whether the viewer has young children or pets, and so on, which allows advertisers to more specifically target their ad purchases. Just as Facebook and other social media are funded in large part by users allowing their data to be sold, so too are the mass media of the future likely to be funded.

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