DIGITAL MEDIA

Between Christmas and new year, when many Australians were busy watching the cricket, hitting the sales or idly contemplating the vices to be given up on New Year’s Day, our new federal minister for digital things, Stephen Conroy, was busy talking up the new government’s plans to protect the nation’s children from net nasties.

Every Australian government, newly elected or newly returned, has had a shot at web censorship going all the way back to 1996, not too far after the birth of the commercial internet in Australia. Which makes the latest manifestation of internet policy a bit unremarkable but for one thing. Senator Conroy’s observation in a TV interview that if we can classify films, we should be able to do the same with websites and block all the ones that might cause offence or harm.

It’s probably too early to be bagging the new Federal Government. It wouldn’t be giving them a fair go, it might even be un-Australian so early in its first term of office, to point out just now that attempting to classify every website on the planet might be more of a challenge than looking at every film shown in Australia each year. At any rate, our Minister’s observation is far more instructive for the digital media industry in other ways. Particularly how we are all very prone to thinking about the new in the context of the old.

As human beings we’re famous for viewing new developments in technology and behaviour through the prism of existing technology and behaviour, and responding inappropriately. The film industry? Still photography with moving pictures until someone realised that they could move the camera around, not just the actors. Television? Radio with pictures. The web? Variously an extension of the newspaper, film and then TV industries, with lots of people losing loads of money along the way. The post-internet music industry? Enough said. As a species, we seem to always deal with the threat of the new by attempting to retro-fit it into the way we dealt with the old – until someone finally makes a genuine breakthrough in their thinking about how technology and consumers are starting to intersect, and often becomes rich in the process.

So for 2008, here’s my wish list for some fresh thinking in the digital media industry.

First and foremost, is this the year that mobile content, the mobile internet, and by extension mobile advertising, takes off? We know that mobile should become another major digital media channel, one that will surpass the now traditional internet in terms of ubiquity. The trouble with mobile content is that it looks a lot like the internet did in the 1990s. Walled gardens, slow speeds, expensive to connect to, costly devices, not enough consumers with the right devices and widespread ignorance of the handset capabilities. So it’s very tempting as an industry to think of the unknown potential of mobile content as if it’s a repeat of the internet. It’s not. The very mobility of the device will create a distinctly different set of consumer media consumption patterns. If we want to make 2008 the year where mobile content starts to become an industry reality, we need to make sure that we apply some fresh, open-minded thinking to it.

Same goes for privacy, an area in definite need of new thinking in 2008. We know we’re dealing with a consumer generation that has a different attitude to privacy. Countless surveys have shown that the digital generation are perfectly happy to trade off some personal information in exchange for getting access to the applications and content they enjoy. And that they understand that advertising helps make their digital lives go round. However this does not make it open-slather on privacy. We started to see some limits appearing in consumer tolerance over privacy in 2007 with the Facebook Beacon debacle. Now there are mutterings coming out of the US about setting up do-not-track registers and rising uneasiness about the privacy implications of behavioural targeting, all developments that won’t go unnoticed by the authorities here in Australia. So easy does it in approaching privacy in 2008.

Then there’s the economy. In many respects the digital media industry is behaving as if it’s economically bullet-proof again. That line of thinking resulted in the self-inflicted recession we imposed on ourselves in 2000 when every other economic sector was starting to take off. Only this time, digital media is integrated enough into the mainstream economy that we’re likely to be subjected to the same economic forces. Our industry and a big chunk of our audience have never experienced a broad economic downturn. So we really don’t know what happens to a digital media industry if the economy goes off the boil. So it’s time to start thinking about strategies for thriving when the economy is down, not perpetually up.

Anyway, back to the example that started the year off.

What would happen if we tried to apply the traditional thinking about film classification to the web? What if we tried to make sure that every site like www.fluffytoys.com or www.childwelfare.gov was innocent and not some evil front for the armies of kiddie pornsters out to corrupt the nation’s youngsters (the verdict on both these two random examples, by the way – innocent)?

Australia’s chief censors, the Office of Film and Literature Classification, made 6693 classification “decisions” in the last financial year – 402 of these related to films and, interestingly, 28 related to internet content. The OFLC cost approximately $8m to run during that time, meaning that the average cost of each classification decision was $1195. No one really knows how many websites there are but estimates range from 70 million of them in the US to 9 billion of them, and counting, globally. You have to admire the can-do attitude of our new Federal Government. That’s a lot of classification decisions. And it really will require some fresh thinking.John Butterworth is chief executive of AIMIA.

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