Hybrid information systems: the post-digital media industry
Information systems will be born from the ashes of the media obliterated by digital, a broader, decentralised, reshuffled replacement. But that won’t come easily.
Two stakeholders determined the whole Western post-industrial agenda: the elites and the media. They intermingled, most of the time, the latter has been controlled by the former. The media industry maturity could find parallels with the countries development levels too, once media monitored the institutional performance. The digitisation and the rise of social media brought the balance to an end. The elites lost touch with society and the increasing inequality (the root cause of our entropy), and reality-based media crashed due to the destructive power of the digital revolution smashing the traditional business models.
The chaos we see today is unsurmountable for several reasons, but one of them is probably the worst (because it breeds all the others): Western societies (and governments) have lost data sovereignty, with data flowing unchecked. Saving traditional journalism is impossible, but making it feasible in another shape is. Information systems will be much broader, resilient and decentralised. We need to have checks and balances not only to media content but to all information systems available.
Media was the reality filter linking people and institutions in the countries with stable democracies. It was a lynchpin between citizens, lawmakers and justice. Accountability was vital for all involved. All of them had to agree on what the facts were. If any part tried to create its own reality ould come unmasked by the others. This agreement failed when digital and social media allowed new realities to lock hostage audiences in bubbles. This is no news at all, and it’s improbable that you hadn’t known about it before.
What may not be just as clear is that fixing journalism models so they can come back to the previous reality is impossible. Broadcasters and publishers lost their grip at the very moment that regular people managed to spread information without using the media bottlenecks. Newsrooms like in the past won’t be the rulers again. They will need to learn to co-exist with a new, hybrid environment of information systems, including IoT, until encrypted messaging and decentralised networks pushing information forward.
“Information systems” may sound too vague, but it’s the best word applicable we have. We still don’t know which technologies and professionals will fully define this new scene. If newspapers and broadcasters once held control of the system one day due to the high operational costs and government ties to obtain the needed licenses, now the new format of the environment is likely to be much more fragmented. It will be hard to regulate, with corporations pressing to re-gain control but failing to do it (as far as democracies endure).
The keyword here is decentralisation. Players from different industries will become providers, in many cases, with totally different objectives. Agricultural weather forecasters will not be bundled alongside Japanese hardcore channels to satisfy intermediaries with vast contact networks because they will no longer be needed. Titans like Disney aside, there will still be corporations, sure. Still, with annihilated entry barriers, payment channels to cover any need, money will flow much easier, especially when cryptocurrencies is no longer seen as unreliable (tech evolution always wins in the end, even if the timeframes are messy).
The rationale behind de-fi will spread to content forcefully, sooner or later, because the ties keeping the whole previous media structure have been cut for good, and they tend to stay fragmented. Audiences will blend and mix separately following shared interests. This is what a healthy society should aspire to. Accountable shared power is still the most efficient model. This liquid nature will allow the smooth allocation of audiences into their most adequate providers and resources. If challengers try to overrule the model, the pressure will be on them, and eventually, they will give up as well.
However, it’s not going to be easy. The current rulers that stolen the power from the previous model will fight back. Walled gardens will demand more and more exclusivity, and in some cases, they will become more aggressive to keep their territory. The companies managing our data today do it with far less control than they should. Think about tentacular products that try to lead you to do more and more without leaving their premises.
The data sovereignty loss is not just a market matter. It’s a failure that will allow governments to avoid becoming hostages of trillionaire conglomerates. Today, the incumbents are too strong and feel their grip on data as crucial to their survival because shareholders can’t accept lower profit margins, even if it costs — as we see — a terrible danger for society. But even with draconian regulation, they will still be money-printing machines, providing valuable services.
The corporate PR likes to state that data ownership (and data sovereignty) makes profit too hard ane economies will pay the price with jobs and tax money lost, but this is not true. Still, it may indeed bring obscene profit margins down, but that will mean more money poured into infrastructure and individual rights. No tech company will be even close to a financial danger zone if data management becomes accountable. Charts and studies may be thrown on our faces to prove that, but those are nothing but convenient sophisms.
Decentralisation is a trend that won’t stop, not even if kept artificially dormant by financial or regulatory demands. This is where the vagueness of the “information systems” concept justifies the ambiguity. Blockchain-based products, stable cryptocurrencies properly regulated (formally or informally), financial statistics services, digital SaaS businesses, public databases access, and many other things will create this new “media” environment, where media will be no longer factual and/or opinative, journalistic material only. Citizens will get their information from a multi-fragmented market deeply interconnected. They will choose the information streams that make more sense to them. The megacorporations trying to keep people in their stables are fighting against the media fragmentation that brought them to life in the first place. They promised us freedom and privacy, but mindsets change or reveal their true nature after seizing power.
The process described above is not a formal one. Companies will always do what they should — make money — but societies looking for their well-being and safety will get into a collision course. That’s unavoidable. Yes, there will be damage, there will be collateral and mayhem, which can be exponentially larger if individual rights are not safeguarded. But what is history other than painful conflicts trying to find balance
