Looking Ahead By Looking Backward   

Mediamorphosis:
Understanding New Media
By Roger Fidler
Pine Forge Press

Mediamorphosis:
Understanding New Media
By Roger Fidler
Pine Forge Press
302 pages; $25.95

I n "Mediamorphosis," veteran journalist and innovator Roger Fidler applies a fresh and welcome twist to today's preoccupation with future-gazing. He looks ahead by looking backward.

Operating as part historian and part visionary, Fidler proposes several futuristic media scenarios. They come not just from the science-fictionish regions of imagination, but also from careful study of past behavior and its logical implications.

Fidler has the credentials for this venture, having spent the brunt of his career leading forays toward the future. He enlisted in the vanguard of newspaper redesigners when color and computerization arrived; helped shepherd the highly touted but unsuccessful Viewtron videotex experiment; and until recently directed Knight-Ridder's high-tech information design lab.

Repeatedly he has brought an original, fertile mind to bear on leading-edge issues. "Mediamorphosis" is an effort to fuse the many strands and tendrils of his interests into a coherent, understandable vision. It's a vision tempered by the failures Fidler has experienced and the firsthand knowledge that dramatic change comes in toddler steps more often than lunges.

Jumping ahead to the year 2010,
Fidler foresees a world where multimedia headsets teleport people into a virtual reality "metaverse," a global web of cybercommunities for shopping, working and playing. Boundaries blur between the real and the virtual as people "fly" from site to site, stopping for teleconferences and video-mail encounters and morphing whenever they wish into their "avatars," or special online identities that preserve their privacy and anonymity.

Home servers coordinate massive family interactive video displays, delivering on-demand music, TV, movies and personalized video background scenes for waking up, studying and romancing.

Magazine-sized electronic tablets let consumers view or listen to "digital print media" — newspapers, magazines, books and other information supplied on request and customized by electronic "personal agents." These powerful, pre-programmed search agents roam cyberspace "to gather, sort and filter information and entertainment to match individual requirements and tastes."

Fidler acknowledges that these kinds of predictions, though irresistible, invariably go wrong. But more valuable than the crystal-ball work is the thoughtful, systematic way Fidler arrives at his vision.

He looks back on what he calls three mediamorphoses, or profound media transformations produced by various social, cultural, economic and technological forces. The first was spoken language; the second, written language; the third, digital language.

shen, synthesizing others' research into his own, Fidler derives several principles governing change in the media.

Technology alone doesn't drive such change, he believes, but it must be accompanied by need and some "motivating..reason" for change. New media emerge gradually, in a "coevolution" with old media, which adapt for survival. Though new media may seem to arrive with warp speed, in reality they take "at least one human generation" to reach the mainstream.

All this leads to several powerful insights that help explain which innovations succeed and why:

• People crave interaction with each other, not with machines or data, Fidler believes, and that's why experiments in videotex and two-way TV have suffered.

• We miss the point by unduly comparing online media to broadcast or print. Online compares more closely to interpersonal media, such as face-to-face communication that is "two-way, participatory, unscheduled and unmediated." That resemblance helps explain online's great appeal and the direction in which it is heading.

• Most people don't fall for high-tech gizmos per se. Instead, consumers "buy content, usefulness and convenience at the point when they perceive value to match the cost."

• Though Fidler isn't optimistic about the future of ink-on-pulp, he sees bright prospects for digital publishing that looks and feels much like today's newspapers and magazines. There is something more important to a publication than the paper it prints on, Fidler believes. Essential assets include "publishers' brand names" and "their credibility and connections to the communities they serve."

What he contends, importantly, is that in the end technology won't matter the most. Responsibility, service, content and credibility will continue, he believes, to transcend.

Who knows whether Fidler is right on the details? What does it matter? The true contribution of "Mediamorphosis" is to provide an informed, evidence-based conceptual template to help guide our thinking about changing media. In an era of cyberhype, that's a genuine old-fashioned service.