Who Is Really Isolated?

This week, I’ve been hearing a lot of traditional media executives say that if you allow consumers to customize their own media, then ‘each consumer will become isolated in his own world.’

Wake up! Each consumer has always been isolated in his or her own world. They are today; they were 50 years ago; and they will be tomorrow.

When I recommend that consumers be able to customize their own media, I’m not talking about them changing. I’m talking about media companies changing to fit an integral characteristic of their customers.

For centuries, analog technologies have limited those media companies to producing generic products — not because consumers were generic, but because those technologies could produce nothing else.

Most media companies have become so accustomed to producing generic products that they actually believe that their customers are generic. Those are the companies that can’t understand why their readerships or viewerships are declining.

Read what I wrote yesterday about the inertia of these companies.

One Reply to “Who Is Really Isolated?”

So, they *don’t* think I pick up the paper, read the business and sports sections, then the comics, then put the paper down? Does that make me “isolated in my own world”?

“Wake Up!” is right.

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What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.