What they’re saying in California

On a visit to Los Angeles for Serious Play, a conference put on by our friends at the Art Center College of Design.

There are some interesting media types around including John Puerner recently publisher of the LA Times. At a dinner hosted by the Art Center’s President Richard Koshalek I get the privilege of saying something about the media.

Here is an approximate summary of what I try to get across.

The upheavals in the global system since 1989 – the fall of the Berlin wall – are the most profound for at least a century. We had the end of history, the unipolar moment, the American imperium, the rise of “the rest”, the victory of hard power, the revival of soft power, the birth of capitalist autocracies, the clash of civilisations and the return of history. All in under 20 years. As Phillip Stephens of the FT says: “we live in an era of jagged lines where established power structures are buckling yet it is far from obvious what will replace them.”

The upheavals in technology and medicine since 1989 have probably been the most profound ever. Consider: the internet, genomics, fibre optics, satellite tv, cell phones, cloning, DNA testing, the artificial heart….to mention just a few

The upheavals in philosophy and religion have been just as huge. Consider what old certainties have NOT been abandoned, to be replaced by, at best, seething doubts and, at worst, short-term cults and extremism.

The upheavals in culture are just beginning. For example the impact of Brahms in Beijing, the huge success of Chinese design in London, the sudden appearance of Russian 19th century art in the West – all evidence of a global trade in creativity that, far from leading to a world which is “flat” are cultivating a world of multilayered identities and deep variety.

And then perhaps in the greatest upheaval of all we are told that we are destroying our ecosystem and consuming our natural resources in such a way as to guarantee the extinction of the human race sometime in the imaginable future……is it any wonder that we are more afraid, confused, anxious and frustrated by the complexity of modern life than any generation before us?

This condition of fearful confusion is the root cause of a very great deal of what is happening in media and design.

First – the obvious point. It has supercharged the general post-enlightenment drift towards individualism. Collective, authoritarian systems and institutions are turning to dust to be replaced by an explosion of social organisms in every sphere of life – “wikinomics” rules.

Second – the less obvious point. It is driving an incredible thirst for explanation. Why else does non-fiction sell so well, even when it is about the history of quinine or how to speak Latin? And what print brands seem currently to be immune to decline? The Week, The Economist, the FT — titles that do most to analyse and set things in context

These two tides are the yin and yang of our media age – a unity of opposites. Readers are separate so want to be together. Readers are together but want to work things out separately.

These wants can be met by designers. That’s the Zeitgeist. It is not rock stars, or bishops or politicians that are going to do it for us. We are not demanding causes, or religions or social ideologies. We want patterns. And creating meaningful patterns is what designers can do best.

Design underpins every form of creation from making a table to the way we plan and execute our lives. Good design (think Iphone) projects a way of understanding the world and creating a community that is both collective enough and individual enough to satisfy the spirit of the age.

You’d think media does this too. Or it should. But the industry is in panic. The accepted view is that a) mass media is crumbling with print and mainstream TV dying the fastest b) social media is taking over the world c) the age of authority (expert, commentator, editorial elite) is over and d) the new reality is “martini media” – anytime, anyhow, anywhere.

However, this is too simple by half. Healthy societies need healthy media. In order to keep our societies healthy, we have to renounce wringing our hands and mentally killing ourselves off and start right now reinventing ourselves for the next generation.

This is the time to do it. Technology has given us the tools for a renaissance in media as powerful and exciting as what happened in 15th century European painting.

Take the newspaper industry. Many people think it is doomed. But I believe it’s no more doomed than painting or live music or film. It’s not like vinyl & CDs because it does something unique. It can’t just be replaced by the web. And it speaks directly to the thirsts of the zeitgeist — the ultimate social organism plus a trove of analysis and explanation.

The debate is sometimes set up as Walter Lippmann (representing: a single national narrative and agreed “set of facts”) v John Dewey (representing the wisdom-of-crowds).

Watch out for Lippmann. It’s his turn for a comeback.

So in the world of newspapers we need to get reinventing. In particular there are five areas that we need to think about:

• NEWS: less of ‘what’s new’ and more of ‘what’s important’. Once you have decided what’s important you will find an entirely new kind of news. And deciding what’s important needs to be opened up to millions of people not six editors in a board room
• NEWSROOMS: so that networked journalism/user generated content becomes an integral part of the operation not a separate walled-off process
• COSTS: so that all barriers to readership are removed: newspapers in future will be free (paid for by advertising)
• COMMUNICATION: less words, more graphics, photography, colour, shapes, visual signals
• PRINTING: digital printing will allow us to have daily magazines – and personalized daily magazines at that. One day you’ll get your own daily magazine delivered to your home or printed on your home printer. It could be a general briefing on world affairs written by editors PLUS some great writing and graphic art and photograpy selected by editors PLUS a host of conversations and topics selected by readers PLUS all your favourite sporting and cultural news requested by you PLUS the data that you need to run your life (weather, share prices, traffic) selected by you PLUS specialist sections on your particular industry or hobby. And it will have personalized advertising that gently reminds you when you need a new car or your laptop is five years old.

It’s all incredibly exciting. We are in an age of upheaval; our insecurities have created powerful tides; we need to ride with those tides and, more than ever, we need to be bold.

1 comment May 8th, 2008