New Media vs Old Media

A few days back, I came across an interesting post by Jack Yan entitled “New media’s next battle with old media“. The catalyst for this short post is reading Justin’s “Straits Times Stomp.com.sg Launches! A Short Review“. The dots start to connect again and perhaps, it might be of interest to put some thought onto the subject.

The situation of the new media vs old media can be interpreted using Clayton M. Christensen’s idea of Disruptive Technology (from Wikipedia):

A disruptive technology is a new technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or product in the market. Disruptive technology is radically different from the existing technology and is often not as good as the established technology, in terms of expectations of most profitable customers.

The simplest example of disruptive technology is digital cameras which took away the need for film in traditional cameras.

If we recast old media into this model, traditional print media encompasses the following: newspaper, journals, magazines, radio and TV. To be fair, the old media industry has now consolidated into large corporations and the management have a very strong control towards what gets transmitted to the people. The new media revolutionized by the birth of the internet, is now championed by the world wide web and open source ideals of sharing information, followed by the resurgence of web 2.0 (personally I feel that it’s a rebrand of content management), which basically invoke the technologies of blogging, podcasting and videocasting. The internet has sought to redistribute power once against the old media. Here is the issue, how long will the old media tolerate this emergence of an opposing force and seek to consolidate it within its grip?

A few years ago, when Amazon first came to being, the traditional bookstores were threatened. In the end, the traditional bookstores set up their homepages which also catered to selling books online. Actually, some of them have now worked with Amazon to merge into similar services. Traditional businesses, being stronger and strapped with more cash, counter-attacked by taking the technology of internet. Notice also that the two biggest revenue generators in the web are not high technology but pornography and online casino.

Yet, the new media issue is more complex, because it relates to the freedom of speech and expression. Citizen journalism has transformed the way how large corporations sought to control the media to their own purpose. A good case study in our local community is the STOMP example, stated by Justin. There are limits which established media will not dare to trepass. The case mentioned by Justin in [8] is a good example. Still STOMP is still living under web 1.0 and not 2.0, because their website is still traditional in design. For a S$2M project, I am interested how the cost could go that high. At least, we started SG Entrepreneurs with zero cents, and then we are now growing positive in profit to fund our contributors. Even as we are talking here, I really wonder whether it will ever substitute or be subsumed by the old media.

Related Posts:
[1] Legal Janitor, “Quick Update: You don’t need record companies to develop the music industry“.
[2] Bjorn Lee, “A Digg Clone Named Netscape and New-Age Journalism“.
[3] Adrian Lee, “Rant Stomp is kinda lame“.
[4] Mr Miyagi, “TODAY: When stars cross into (cyber)space…“.
[5] Mooiness, “STOMP – Star Blog“.
[6] themediaslut, “The Straits Times editor wants to be friends with blogs“.
[7] Yawning Bread, “Stomping its way to…. where?“.
[8] Justin Lee, “Singapore Void Deck Beatup Video Clip: The Blindspot of Stomp.com.sg?.

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