Abduction, not addiction
Doc Searls has a nicely wrought rant about a silly New York Times piece that opens with a vignette of a former colleague of mine at SoftBank. Charley Lax, still a venture capitalist is "sitting in a conference for telecommunications executives at a hotel near Los Angeles, but he is not all here. Out of one ear, he listens to a live presentation about cable television technology; simultaneously, he surfs the Net on a laptop with a wireless connection, while occasionally checking his mobile device — part phone, part pager and part Internet gadget — for e-mail."
The writer says that it is odd that Charley paid $2,000 to be at the event and ignore it, at least in part, then goes on to insert a plug for Tony Perkins' Always On site by branding the culture Charley Lax represents as "Always On," which is the name of Tony's new site. The writer, Matt Richel, must be angling for an assignment.
Charley says: "It's hard to concentrate on one thing," he said, adding: "I think I have a condition."
I like Charley, but basically he's always had a condition. I remember him once saying he'd closed 17 funding agreements in 15 days -- which crosses into the insanely overactive, both financially and intellectually. It's that condition that makes Charely good at what he does. The rest of the article is silly puffery about data addiction creating a kind of condition like Attention Deficit Disorder. And Doc, who is not a doctor, is right to dismiss most of the piece as mass media anguishing over new competitors for people's attention. Granted, I suffer from the multiple attention compulsion, too, but so does any news junky, whether they have five TVs running simultaneously or surf Web sites while sitting in $2,000 conferences. I find you don't have to go many places to be connected these days and rather wonder at the conference jockeys who travel from place to place to stay connected.
Anyway, I don't entirely agree with Doc's assessment of the media:
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Here's what's on TV right now: Nothing. Trust me. You can store it for later suckage off your TiVo, but it'll still be Nothing.
Here's what's in your magazines right now: Lots of stuff you're not interested in. Same with your newspapers.
As for radio: Forget it, unless you're an amen-corner conservative, a sports junkie, an NPR addict, or in need of a traffic report in the next fifteen minutes.
Yes, there's lots of stuff in all those media you'll like or use. Hell, you probably depend on a lot of it, in the best sense of that verb. But you have to wait for it if it's on a broadcast outlet or root for it in a publication. More importantly, you're not in charge. They are. And to Them, you're still just a consumer. A gullet for gobbling "content" and crapping cash. (Thank you for that perfect metaphor, Jerry Michalski.) Yes, Even if They are NPR and the New York Times. They are The Media. Information is a form of "content" that moves from Them to you, on an almost entirely one-way basis.
The Web is ours, not theirs.
In fact, the Web is everyone's and the media companies are only one more constituent of the collective flow. That's the change -- it's not ownership of a place, but ownership of our will and attention on an end-to-end network that points everywhere, depending how you look at it. We look at what we want to, as long or briefly as we like, not according to the day parts of the broadcast world. But the broadcast world is still there and we can blend bits into our attention at will, TiVo and DSL allowing us to do so. I want to know what the scores in Major League Baseball are during the day--I have baseball on with the sound turned down whenever a game is on. Does that mean I am sucking at the teat of mindlessness? Does it mean I have a baseball problem? Fuck no. It means I take control of the media and point it where I want to look. There is something on TV for me at those times. I use radio content selectively and rely on Audible to time-shift what I want to listen to, wherever I want to listen. And then there is the Net. We own our attention, but we contribute to a rich fabric of stuff--some content, some conversation, some conflagration and flame-fest. And, amazingly, we have a voice as large as any media company Right Now, while someone is paying attention. The only thought crime is to assume that attention may be abducted and forced onto something it doesn't want to attend to.
There was a moment during a staff call for InnovationWorld the other day when I mentioned that Boston was up a run on the Yankees and one of the writers said, "Yeah, I know, isn't that great?" Was he not paying attention to me? Of course not, he was splitting his attention and what should I do, fire his ass for not conforming to rules of corporate employment? No -- I had the game on, too. In fact, I've never met him in person, having relied entirely on the Net and telephone calls to find and interview him, but I hired him and he's working out great. We are all mutants, thank the gods.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at July 8, 2003 09:32 AM | TrackBack