Larvatus Prodeo

Sometime around 2018 all our news will be based on the idea of probability, offered up by a giant near sentient super computer able to calculate billions of computations per second. With the full contents of the worlds history in it’s archives and having all current human activity (including mums e-mail of that curry recipe to aunt Kylie) fed into it daily, it will project the daily news based on precise self created mathematical algorithms.

Digg like betting markets will be created around these projections and billions will be won or lost by a new kind of master of the universe, the alcopops fuelled sixteen year old news junkie. Rupert the super computer will be fed daily with an engineered paste created from the remains of all living editors, sub editors, columnists, journalists and bloggers. Unfortunately this masterful human creation will go completely bonkers when accidentally fed a tube of Bolt. All news will end, and as we know, no news is good news so the world will celebrate it’s new found freedom from media tyranny.

In a highly amusing post called Unthinkable Futures, Kevin Kelly writes about a fifteen year old exchange of ideas on improbable events he shared with Brian Eno - this improbability from Eno caught my attention.

News is understood to be a creation of our attention and interests (rather than “the truth”) and news shows are redesigned as “thinktanks,” where four interesting minds from different disciplines are asked the question, “So what do YOU think happened today?” Later, four uninteresting minds (chosen from the pages of Ordinary People magazine) are asked the same questions.

I’m still trying to work out why the ABC’s Q&A immediately came to mind when I read that.

Mark Day in the Oz media section gave us a nice improbability piece of his own this past week on the future of print in a digital world with this punchline.

I’m not suggesting that newspapers should fill their pages with stories of the aged and infirm, or even tour guides for grey nomads, but editing with a bit of maturity would be a step in the right direction. Introducing more long-form copy and resisting populism and cheap shots would add greatly to their credibility and, at the same time, would provide readers with a deeper sense of satisfaction.

As newspapers are buffeted by the winds of change, it makes sense to protect existing audiences rather than ignoring them in pursuit of a target that will never materialise. The good part about this is that the technology that provides the threat also provides the opportunity.

I’m of a generation old enough to agree because I do remember what a book looks like, but I also think he’s asking print to die a slow death along with it’s audience, which it will. What old skool guys like Day still don’t fully appreciate is that the kids are consuming and creating their media in a way that they just don’t get.

Long form copy? WTF is that Mr Day? Ru SeRyUs? You want me to read something longer than one hundred and sixty characters? Watch something longer than two minutes? Listen to some old dude called a shock jock? Sorry that horse has bolted and it has a mobile phone with a social network attached to it, one where news and opinion is supplied by peers, not Piers.

Secondly, guys like him still believe that what they do will have major currency in a world where media is delivered to you in a thousand different ways by thousands of different people, none of them with a masthead and all of them redefining what news looks and reads like. In fact all their proposed measures to combat the future are designed to do just that, save their pride of of place in the media landscape. Improbable future by Day? Absolutely.

So, in lieu of my intended crowd sourced questions for the press gallery post (because that damn prolific Kim stole most of my thunder not because some jackass with an internet connection and an tinfoil wrapped ego hijacked the last post) I’d like to run with Kelly and Eno’s idea of unthinkable futures but limited to Australian media. Where will it be in, say, ten years? Print, digital, broadcast, mobile, whatever?