42 Distribute and Be Damned
beyond all recognition, from the presses on which papers and magazines
were printed to the transport systems required to move them in bulk.
This point is important: insisting upon the “good old days” of print
journalism ignores the fact that the print industry was subject to incredible innovations – but innovations that took place over a period of some
two centuries. What is evident in the past 20 years of widespread use of
the Internet, and a mere decade since the rise of apps and smartphones,
is that the systems of news production have been utterly disrupted and
that the economic value of news has shifted unsustainably from production to distribution.
Parasitology: Tech Tapeworms and Clownfish
There is a collective consciousness among content creators that they
are bearing the costs and that others are reaping some of the revenues. Inevitably that profound contradiction will be a catalyst for
action and the moment is nigh.
There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet.
18
Speaking to The Australian newspaper in 2009, this was how the newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch described companies such as Google. A
year after the greatest financial crash since 1929, the advertising revenues of News Corp continued to decline even as Google’s grew exponentially. The role played by Google (and then Facebook) in the changing
economic fate of news production is the main focus of this chapter – but
it is also worth considering how big tech companies came to occupy such
a position in relation to more traditional media companies, and how
much the rapid changes in the economics of journalism were solely the
responsibility of digital media upstarts.
First of all, however, it is worth considering what it means to be a tech
tapeworm: the analogy might not be the most accurate one available.
In the Pacific, for example, especially around the waters of Northern
Australia, Southeast Asia, and Japan, lives Amphiprion ocellaris, or the
common clownfish, easily recognisable by its orange-brown and white
stripes. These fish dwell among the tentacles of the Ritteri anemones and
have developed a particular mucus that protects them from the stinging
poison of the anemones: that poison tends to drive away predators of the
clownfish, while Amphiprion ocellaris, in turn, protects the anemones
from fish that will eat them. Nature is full of such examples of mutual
symbiosis, some more dramatic than others, whereby creatures that inhabit different life forms may provide different benefits. Rather in the
same way that Jussi Parikka argues that we should consider the essentials of a non-human media, dynamic systems of relations, perceptions,
and cohabitations that create new processes of “embodied technics”.
19
beyond all recognition, from the presses on which papers and magazines
were printed to the transport systems required to move them in bulk.
This point is important: insisting upon the “good old days” of print
journalism ignores the fact that the print industry was subject to incredible innovations – but innovations that took place over a period of some
two centuries. What is evident in the past 20 years of widespread use of
the Internet, and a mere decade since the rise of apps and smartphones,
is that the systems of news production have been utterly disrupted and
that the economic value of news has shifted unsustainably from production to distribution.
Parasitology: Tech Tapeworms and Clownfish
There is a collective consciousness among content creators that they
are bearing the costs and that others are reaping some of the revenues. Inevitably that profound contradiction will be a catalyst for
action and the moment is nigh.
There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet.
18
Speaking to The Australian newspaper in 2009, this was how the newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch described companies such as Google. A
year after the greatest financial crash since 1929, the advertising revenues of News Corp continued to decline even as Google’s grew exponentially. The role played by Google (and then Facebook) in the changing
economic fate of news production is the main focus of this chapter – but
it is also worth considering how big tech companies came to occupy such
a position in relation to more traditional media companies, and how
much the rapid changes in the economics of journalism were solely the
responsibility of digital media upstarts.
First of all, however, it is worth considering what it means to be a tech
tapeworm: the analogy might not be the most accurate one available.
In the Pacific, for example, especially around the waters of Northern
Australia, Southeast Asia, and Japan, lives Amphiprion ocellaris, or the
common clownfish, easily recognisable by its orange-brown and white
stripes. These fish dwell among the tentacles of the Ritteri anemones and
have developed a particular mucus that protects them from the stinging
poison of the anemones: that poison tends to drive away predators of the
clownfish, while Amphiprion ocellaris, in turn, protects the anemones
from fish that will eat them. Nature is full of such examples of mutual
symbiosis, some more dramatic than others, whereby creatures that inhabit different life forms may provide different benefits. Rather in the
same way that Jussi Parikka argues that we should consider the essentials of a non-human media, dynamic systems of relations, perceptions,
and cohabitations that create new processes of “embodied technics”.
19