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Bamboozled at the Revolution
The book is an inside tale told by an insider who chronicles the frantic days when the insiders were certain that the Internet was going to change everything. In this case, the insiders were the golden boys at media conglomerates who managed through some mixture of luck, devotion, and talent to control the worlds of cable television, newspapers, magazines, and movies. In the mid 1990's, the Internet threatened to overturn their world when they realized that anyone could set up a website, turn a bedroom into a corner office, and join the media. One minute some Mom in NJ is burning spaghetti sauce, the next minute Madonna is coming over for a chat on her weblog.
Reading the book is an ideal way for Slashdot readers to stick their nose into the exclusive tent filled with media moguls. The book does an ideal job of conveying the NY mindset that the world is made up of billions of sheep just waiting for the media to tell them how to bleat. When the Internet threatens to lure some of the flock, the big guys with the big corner offices start writing checks hoping to find a way to own a piece of it.
The book is played out chronologically and begins with Time-Warner's desire to build a full-service, interactive cable system in 1993. The final epilog was probably written in April and it's already a bit dated because it went to press before the accounting upheaval at AOL. In between, the executives of the big media companies struggle to find an Internet strategy-- something that never really gels for anyone.
Motavalli documents the progression with details that matter to media executives. We learn where people went to college (Haverford, Harvard), where they ate dinner (City Grill, "a gross strip mall" in Vienna, VA that serves great pizza,), the names of their yachts (Highlander), if their offices were big (yes), and if they got along (no). All of the executives in this book are always getting irked, losing confidence, chafing at some new org chart, or jettisoning some division.
Nothing seems to work for these guys. They try merging with each other; they try pop-up ads; and they try building portals. Yet through it all, the value of advertising just keeps dropping. The more time people spend on-line, the more page views they create. That means, more viewers mean lower ad prices. Uh-oh. The law of supply and demand seems to insist that success only begets failure. How are people going to make money on-line? We may never know, because nothing except the severance packages ever work out for the guys in the corner offices. The Internet won't be tamed.
To some extent, the title of the book is a misnomer. There aren't many stories of fast talking Internet guys pulling the wool over the eyes of the old media guys, at least in the way that Lyle Lanley talked the town of Springfield into building a monorail. The media moguls knew that the Internet was going to be big and they knew they only way they could be part of it was to invest. As Bob Pittman says at the beginning of the book, the networks ignored cable channels and then woke up one day to see that the upstarts controlled the new landscape. The old school media magnates knew they had no choice and they spent freely.
The title is also a bit wrong because the bamboozled are usually outright losers, conned completely -- and that certainly hasn't happened to all of the media titans. The list of the top news sites from Jupiter Media Metrix includes plenty of old corporate names . Despite the loss of cash, some of the old media companies were able to dominate the Internet. That doesn't mean they'll stay in the business and it doesn't mean that they're making money, but no one is worrying about the Mom in NJ.
This world view is a bit myopic. It should come as no surprise that web sites like the Drudge Report or Slashdot don't make it into the conversation. This is really a book about the few guys at the top of the New York media empires and their desire to somehow, some way, get a handle on this Internet thing. Truly interactive sites like Slashdot seem to be beyond the understanding of these guys because Motavalli notes that despite the "Letters to the Editors" section, most magazine and newspapers editors don't understand how to interact with readers.
The most telling details may be what didn't make the book. Motavalli spends little time talking about the words and images on the web pages. His subjects liked to use the word "content" as an abstraction for what the little guys serve to the little sheep. No one seemed to wonder whether it was good or bad, noir or funny, juvenile or sophisticated, or anything more than pure content. Aside from an occasional note about some truly lame web site, there's little discussion about what makes a web site good.
This is too bad because a few parts of the book hint that the guys below the big guys were really struggling to find the right voice for the on-line medium. They were asking questions like whether audience liked the ability to pick and choose the video snippets in the evening news. Was an on-line soap opera compelling enough to watch every day? Was there anyone who was willing to camp out by their keyboard to be the first to access some web site? Was buying an MP3 like buying a single or a full album? Did people want one portal or many?
As anyone who's posted to Slashdot in search of karma knows, finding a way to please the crowds is not an easy task. Every artist knows that after all of the hype, all of the press, and all of the marketing, a song, a book, an article, or a Slashdot comment needs to stand alone on the stage, if only for a brief second, and live or die on its merits. Motavalli's book best contribution may be showing us how little the media big wigs cared about these moments. It wasn't about the story or the presentation or even what the sheep seemed to like. It was all about the org chart.
Peter Wayner is a writer, consultant and media mogul himself. If you're one of the sheep reading this far, you might consider consuming his latest content on secure information handling ( Translucent Databases ) or his content on steganography ( Disappearing Cryptography). You can purchase Bamboozled from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Greed.
My gf is taking a finance class this semester. She was disturbed by the fact that the first chapter talked about how awful it was that Ben and Jerry's like to give away a ton of money to charity, etc.
Greed.
Non-geeks started getting on the internet and BBS's because there THEY and not the media controlled the content - what they viewed, when they viewed it, even how it got presented.
Big media when they realized the web would be a lasting media realized that they'd better hurry up and get involved, but they did so incorrectly and too late. They came in expecting they could force us to stick with their basic "this is your entertainment whether you like it or not" just like they do with TV, newspapers, radio, etc.
For example, I recently moved to a small, isolated town and I'm about to fork out the money for sattelite radio for my car. I have 3 choices for music - country, heavy metal or 2 top 40 stations that I refer to as "all Britney all the time". What happened to choice? It's not like the people here are listening to that because they want to - I know a huge number of people that would kill for an alternative station - but someone somewhere decided that's all the music we need. Most offices I've been in listen to internet radio because that way they have a choice in what they hear.
RIAA is mad mostly because they've figured out we pick music they're not trying to push down our throats. Corporations are mad because suddenly we're posting our opinions where they can be seen. People are exercising their freedoms and all of a sudden media types are realizing they don't have the control they thought they had. Too bad.
Hmmm, perhaps like China outlawed Google? Or perhaps like the way international law has begun affecting American trade?
Look, America isn't the center of the universe, but as it happens, it is the wall around the center of me. This causes the precedents set in the United States code to be quite relevant to my experience as a citizen of the Internet, if not my American status. That's the reason why I care if Chinese citizens can't certain websites, yet I've never even stepped on Chinese soil. If it makes you indifferent because you're not a United States citizen, then you miss two very relevant points:
1. It sets a precedent/standard for the international community.
2. I'm probably not going to move to Finland so I can have better internet access, and I'm sure many other Americans feel the same way.
Freedom is freedom whether it originates in the United States or in a small village in Tibet, and I'm quite certain that if you wish to ignore it or minimize it, I'm not interested in what you have to say.
What's interesting is who has been successful in big media on the internet. Almost universally it's been media that genuinely does research: The Wall Street Journal / Barron's and Lexis-Nexis for example. In news sites The New York Times has done quite well. Relative to their print readership non mainstream editorial sites have done well: Znet, Common Dreams, Antiwar.com... Simply restating the obvious and well known and quoting mainstream sources doesn't work. That's going to be very difficult for ABC and CBS (traditional television news powerhouses) to deal with. CBS destroyed their research divisions starting almost 2 decades ago; are they willing to spend the money to rebuild them? Can Disney afford to allow ABC to become more eclectic in their editorial viewpoints?
Pretty much to survive on the internet you have to offer one of 3 things:
1) Material that is not easy available elsewhere
2) Material that is available elsewhere at a much higher cost
3) Material that is cheaply and readily available elsewhere but organized in a unique fashion.