Why is Mobile Called the 7th of the Mass Media

I want to start blogging at this site with the very basics. Why to call it the 7th Mass Media (yes, it is grammatically incorrect, it should be either seventh mass medium, or seventh of the mass media)?  I started to develop this thinking after I saw a Nokia presentation about the role of mobile in the media space, at the 20th anniversary of Cellphones in Canada, where I was delivering the keynote (on the next 20 years, ha-ha, that was quite a challenge for any expert, consultant, futurist or pundit.. That was in 2005.) So this thinking to me is already 3 years old. My first major presentation of the 7th Mass Media was my keynote to i-Mobicon, the annual digital convergence conference in South Korea in December 2005. I also presented this thinking in Helsinki Finland at IIR's annual (Tele) Connector conference and in Tokyo Japan at the 3G Mobile World Conference around that time, so the thoughts have been receiving a lot of exposure to the most advanced mobile telecoms markets right from the start. And I've received enormous support from those markets around this concept as well, right from the start.

So lets start off first, with the numbering. What is this seventh mass media all about?

Print is the oldest mass medium and thus the first of the seven, dating back to the printing press and thus to the end of the 15th century. Print started with the Gutenberg Bible, and then onto other books, and soon pamphlets, then newspapers, and magazines. All based on the same idea of production (a printing press) and paper as the actual "technical" medium, and based on a buy-to-own model. Print introduced advertising with newspapers and subscription models with magazines.

It took 400 years for the first "new media" to appar. Recordings appeared in the last decade of the 1800s to give a new mass media opportunity. What we now know as the music industry, can trace its roots to that moment. Yes, we had musicians before recordings, but the careers of Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna etc could not have happened without the recording industry. Music is not the only successful media concept in recordings. Videogames, personal computer programs, movie rentals and now DVD sales, etc are all part of this mass media opportunity in recordings. The concept is still buy-to-own, but there also is a rental part to recordings, in particular with movie rentals. The industry had a further "burden" of the player (originally literally called the record player). So its not that we only want to sell you a Playstation 3 game or a DVD of Desperate Housewives or a song as an MP3 file, with recordings, differing from print, you had to also buy a playing device. And these almost always were unique to one form of media. A record player could not be used to play an VHS video cassette, etc. Although very recently advanced DVD players will also play music CDs etc. Oh, recordings introduced us to the performing artist (pop star) as distinct from the creator of the music (the composer ie songwriter)

Soon after the recordings came the third mass media channel. Cinema, around 1900. This introduced us to multimedia, and became rapidly the most influential media in the first half of the 20th century. The media consumer did not have to own a "cinema player" but rather movies were shown in cinema theaters and audiences would have to "pay-per-view" to pay every time when seeing a movie.

The fourth of the mass media, radio, once again introduced something new from its introduction from after about 1910. Radio was a broadcast medium. Everyone received the transmission simultaneously. This was the fastest media. It also allowed easy consumption while moving, ie cars soon had built-in radios as standard features. (remember this is still the time before the c-cassette so there was no practical ability to listen to recordings in cars). Radio also required buying the receiving device (a "radio" ha-ha) like with recordings, and eventually the then-world's largest consumer electronics company, Philips decided to combine a portable radio with a portable cassette player-recorder (they called it a "radiorecorder") and today many portable radio units are also CD players and/or cassette players, bringing a lot of convergence between two media categories. Even convergence is nothing new..

The fifth mass media channel is the current giant and champion, television. Introduced commerically to mass audiences in the 1950s (early TV trials and devices were offered already in the 1930s), television was the first time a new mass media appeared with no inherent innovation. We already had moving pictures and sound in the cinema. We already had broadcast in radio. Television just took these two powerful ideas and combined them, to soon dominate over cinema and over radio. In the 1930s families would collect around the radio receiver (often called "the wireless") to listen to the favorite drama or music performance or comedy or the news. Two decades later families would collect around the TV set to do the same.

The sixth mass media is the internet from the 1990s. The internet introduced three powerful concepts - it is the first interactive media, it offers search, and it enables social networking. These are all radical innovations. Interactivity meant that for the first time readers could post comments, send feedback emails, chat and discuss, and do this in real time. Secondly the internet allows searching. For any media owner, this is a powerful way to give audiences access to archival content. It is hard to remember what searching was like before the internet. All major magazines like Time and the Economist etc would release an annual index issue, to help researchers find a lost article. Libraries had "card catalogs" with a cardboard based card, physically describing every book in the library (because a book might not be in the library bookcase when a visitor was interested in that book title). The card catalogs were a crude way to allow research into what a given author may have written, or who all might have books of similar titles, etc. But every library had these card catalogs only of the books they happened to carry. And these were not linked or in any way cross-referenced. Obviously today nobody goes to a card catalog. All searches start with Google or your search engine of preference, on the internet. And last, but not least, of the internet's innovations in media, was social media. The ability to allow online collaboration and commenting by social groups and digital communities. Everything from blogs to citizen journalism to multiplayer gaming. Social networking or "web 2.0" or digital communities is a massive change in society (what Business Week in 2005 called the biggest change in society, since the industrial revolution)

There is one more feature of the internet which is very relevant to mass media discussions. The internet was the first "inherent threat" mass media channel. Inherent threat means that the internet could challenge any previous media and cannibalize it (potentially yes, but not necessarily always successfully). This may seem obvious, and on quick analysis, one might assume all new media are inherently threatening. Yes, when TV was introduced, many accused it of soon killing cinema. Similarly radio was seen as a threat to the music recording industry. But this is not across all media. Consider a magazine with pictures (print media). You cannot show pictures on radio (until now they have some digital radio concepts which allow transmission of images as well). So yes, you could try to move a news story or whatever from a print media to radio, but you cannot show the pictures. Radio cannot cannibalize all of print. But the internet can. It can show the text, and the pictures of any print content. This is true across all previous five mass media channels. TV can cannibalize cinema yes, but you cannot deliver a physical CD recording of Elvis's music through the TV signals. Yes, we can show Elvis singing at the Ed Sullivan theater on Broadway, and yes, after video recorders were introduced (again by Philips, several years before Sony's Betamax) in the 1970s, it became possible to record a TV show. But if you have a record player, or a CD player, and want to play a CD of Elvis, then there is no way to send that CD via the TV signal. You would need to send the songs, and have a recording CD player, to create your own CD at your end, in the best case (today). In the 1950s when TV was introduced, nobody even imagined home recording devices for TV content..  But the internet today does offer the ability to cannibalize all of the previous six mass media. It makes the internet very potent, three unique benefits that cannot be replicated in the earlier 5 media, and also being an inherent threat media channel.

That brings us to mobile, the seventh of the mass media. Mobile phones were commercially launched in Japan in 1979, but they were only voice devices. SMS text messaging became a practical data application when the first person-to-person SMS was sent in Finland in 1993. Even that was not the start of mass media on mobile phones. It wasn't until Radiolinja (in Finland) launched the first downloadable content to mobile phones - the downloadable ringing tone - exactly ten years ago, in the Autumn of 1998. So mobile is the youngest of the mass media channels. That makes it also one which is not very well understood. The first innovative markets were in obscure countries of weird languages - Finland (and Sweden, Norway and Denmark in Northern Europe); and Japan, when NTT DoCoMo introduced the iMode service in 1999. The big media empires tend to be based in the USA - television, radio and advertising centered in New York City, and Hollywood leading the cinema industry in Los Angeles. But Americans happened to lag in cellphone adoption, network quality, telecoms pricing, service innovation; and most certainly in adopting mobile as a media channel. It wasn't until the hype around the Apple iPhone, that the American media giants woke up to the cellphone.

So. What do we know about mobile as a media? I will discuss this topic at great length here at this blog. Obviously my previous five books have all added to this knowhow, and now my brand new book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media is centered on this topic. But lets briefly summarize mobile as a medium.

Like the internet before it, mobile is also an interactive medium, with search and social networking abilities built-in. Like TV and cinema, mobile can do multimedia. Like print, the screen on mobile can show printed content (and images). Like radio, the speaker on the phone can play sounds. And most modern phones have in-built ability to store content, whether MP3 files of songs, or video clips and pictures from the cameraphone, or videogames, etc. So mobile can do recordings as well. Like the internet before it, mobile is thus also an "inherent threat" mass media channel.

But mobile is actually far more powerful than any of the six legacy media channels. First, the numbers. There are over 3.5 billion mobile phone subscriptions on the planet today (growing far faster than the internet or TV or radio etc). There are over twice as many mobile phones as TV sets, three times as many active users of mobile phones than active users of the internet; and four times as many mobile phones as personal computers of any kind, laptops, desktops and servers combined. Worldwide there are more radio sets, but when counting owners of radios, there are far more people who have a personal mobile phone, than have a radio (or multiple radios, as we in the Western Wrold have our home HiFi stereo set with radio, another bedside clockradio, then we have our kitchen radio, and the radio in the car etc etc etc).

Furthermore, where the internet introduced 3 unique benefits; mobile matches those, but adds now seven unique benefits, that none of the legacy media can match.

I will discuss those in my next essay. If you can't wait, I have my Thought Piece on Mobile as 7th Mass Media channel, and it has those seven of course. Send me an email to  tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com and I'll send you the Thought Piece (together with the excerpt of my book).

Comments

[fran]

I prefer the term "4th Screen", ´cause it refers to the last screen to deliver a digital content (the other 3 are: cinema, TV,PC)

I got 2 books about mobile & media,they both in spanish (2007 & 2008)..

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi fran

Good comment, thank you. I obviously like the four screens concept, as that is how I subtitled the title chapter of the book (7th Mass Media - and the fourth screen). So we are not far apart.

First, if you examine multimedia content, in particular moving images - what started out as cinema - then yes, the four screens concept is very powerful to analyze how the moving pictures industry evolved through cinema, TV, PC and mobile phone screens. There is a lot of lessons to mass media in it.

And its a widely accepted view, for example Nokia uses the four screens concept today.

If we consider mass media - which is obviously more broad than multimedia or "moving pictures" content - then the four screens do not capture the oldest mass media, print, and it ignores recordings and radio.

Let me illustrate just through sound. A four screens concept ignores the aural mass media industries (music recordings and radio). For MOBILE mass media content, music is a vital element, and a massive one. Ringtones, ringback tones, truetones and MP3 downloads represent over 10 billion dollars of global revenues to the mobile content industry. Note 10 billion is nearly half of Hollywood box office revenues annually, so this is significant size for an industry.

None of mobile music requires showing videos on a screen (except music videos, which can also be counted as mobile TV content and part of the four screens). You can sell ringback tones to a customer whose mobile phone is so broken, its screen display doesn't work anymore. The whole sales activity, the service deployment, and regular play of the music on ringback, can be done without any screen input (using only the keypad and voice based IVR).

My point is, that if you examine the mobile content opportunity through the lens of the four screens, you easily ignore major parts of the mass media space (ie print, recordings and radio) that do form roughly half of the global mass media industries by revenues.

But yes, the four screens idea is powerful and helps explain differences in the four main screens we have in our lives. It is one way to look at this emerging opportunity in mobile. I did consider it, but thought that the mass media opportunities on mobile, do represent also a major convergence opportunity in the other mass media (print, recordings, radio) that the four screens do not cover. And I do want to encourage colleagues in those industries as well to learn of both the cannibalizing threats, and the career opportunities that mobile represents for them.

Its a shame that I don't speak Spanish, I would love to read your books.

Thank you for visiting, please post follow up comments if you like

Tomi Ahonen :-)