Old Media, New Media, Not Media?

Micro-brainwave…

Murdoch’s campaign on behalf of old media (for which read the Vulpine Empire and its allies) to extract money from Internet gigantors like Google rolls on; just in from the publicity front line, ‘Murdoch warns Google: it’s time to pay’.

One of the things that puzzles me is our tendency to characterise these debates as old media vs new media, whereas I am starting to think that (given what Google is), we probably should see it as old media vs not media. While there are some Internet entities and activities that might be characterised as ‘media’ (in the social institutional sense – eg defined by our operating understandings of ‘the media’ which have developed in the 20th century), there are many – perhaps most – which are not. Moreover, Murdoch/Fox is new media or at least converged media. So, continuing a longstanding distaste for the term new media, can I suggest that the underlying dynamics of the current controversies of over payment for content are because new social forms, like Google, are emerging that are NOT media but which trespass into the economic fiefdoms of media.

Google is not media because it operationalises a different mode of information. Perhaps its motto should be ‘Be Not Media’?

And, by the way, Yahoo’s increasingly tenuous financial claim to exploit online mindshare and relevance suggests that its move to become a media company (see my Argument Against Convergence piece, First Monday) was a bad mistake. Not-media is now the locus of economic insurgency and media is a dangerous place to be.