The democracy of information

Democratisation, devastation and deja vu mark 15 years of the information economy

Were you listening to music in 2000? If so, you would remember Napster. It was born on the back of the then newly discovered MP3 technology - the compressing of digital files allowing them to travel over the net easily. As a result, young people were ripping songs from compact discs (CDs) and sharing those. The fat-with-profits music industry was furious and went after every file-sharing site - Napster being the most popular one. Unable to take the weight of sustained litigation, Napster collapsed, but so did the music industry - before bouncing back 13 years later.

Therein lies the whole story of what the media industry - newspapers, radio, TV, films - has been going through, again and again, over the past 15 years.

THE ONSLAUGHT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
The last fifteen years have seen:

• The blurring of lines between the armchair amateur and the professional
• This has created social, economical and creative disruptions
• And it has given an avenue for talent, such as The Viral Fever or AIB born online, to become a mainstream force
• The online ecosystem mimics all the characteristics of the mainstream media ecosystem
• But it remains the territory of four global corporations

Music listeners were disaggregating from a bundle of songs they were forced to buy in the form of a CD and taking out only the ones they wanted. When the industry gave them that choice through streaming and download services like Pandora, iTunes or Saavn, it bounced back.

This democratisation - the ability of consumers to reject, redo, choose what they want to read, listen, watch, whenever they want it - is the first big change that the past 15 years have forced on the information industry. In the news industry, the ability to put out a rumour, a half-truth or the real facts has meant that everyone and their uncle is a journalist. And the ability to disagree with what is written on dozens of different forums makes a critic out of everybody. Everything from the Nirbhaya documentary to Aamir Khan's comments becomes a trending topic.

The blurring of lines between the armchair amateur and the trained professional creates all kinds of disruptions - socially, economically and, most importantly, creatively. Take news for instance. If news is the intellectual fodder for a society, then social scientists' worry about what we are eating in this deluge is very real. So is the worry about ghettoisation - the primacy of algorithm - driven search engines means if you want to read only about politics in Russia, that is all you will read. It takes away all serendipity from information discovery and arguably weakens democracy. "Democracy functions when there is collective action and, therefore, we need to have a collective news consumption, on some things at least," says Tim Luckhurst, professor and historian of journalism, at the University of Kent.

The blurring also has some nice implications - notice the amount of talent coming out because of YouTube. Everybody from a cook in Noida to your cat can become an online sensation, forcing mainstream media to drop its snooty, 'who are you' attitude. From Star's hotstar, Zee's Ditto TV and Eros' ErosNow, mainstream media firms are trying hard to get the 100 million people watching online video in India. In the process, they are joining hands with names they wouldn't have even considered earlier - Star, for example, has signed on AIB, an online video creator popular for its spoofs.

The second is the havoc this democratisation has wrecked on business models. If music bundling forced consumers to pay $12 for a CD, paying 99 cents for a single song is great. But while disaggregation is good for consumers, it has not yet translated into solid benefits for media companies. In the US, for example, the newspaper industry has seen one-third of its revenues wiped out over the past 15 years, even as the number of people reading news has increased. You could call this evolution if the third thing about this democratisation wasn't true.

That offline revenues of newspapers, film studios and television firms are funding the thirst for this disaggregated content online. Note that the bulk of traffic on search engines, social media and on a host of news sources comes from professionally generated content. More than three-fifths of YouTube's traffic comes from the videos put up by the large studios. Netflix grew on the back of streaming mainstream content, and then became a studio when it commissioned the high-end House of Cards. The best rates go to the sites that can aggregate the largest audience. Building shows with big stars, aggregating mass audiences for advertisers - online does exactly what other media platforms do.

The only difference is that four companies - Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple - walk away with a bulk of the revenues and profits that this medium generates globally. The rest is just fine print. That begs the question - what really is democratic about a medium and a business where revenues and audience power are so heavily concentrated.