Despite the hype, Apple's new iPhone doesn't do much new. Shelves already groan with devices that can email, browse the web, play music, make phone calls and send text messages. The iPhone's claim to fame is simply that it does these things more easily and with more panache than its rivals. But if it works as promised, that could still be enough both to make money and to kickstart a transformation of media.
How? A successful iPhone would make it apparent that media can and should change. While the internet has created some world-changing new technologies—the web and email, to name two—its impact on existing media has so far been negligible. Despite years of babble about convergence, telephony, video, music and the internet have continued to run along separate tracks. The iPhone brings them together. It is the first truly converged device with a real shot at the mass market.
This means that a successful iPhone will alternately delight and frustrate. Delight because it is indeed cooler and easier to use. Frustrate because it will highlight how much cooler and easier to use media could yet be. Why doesn't my phone know where I am, to provide local maps and recommendations? Why can't I get the same videos and music on both sides of the Atlantic? Why can't I send my friend a video clip as easily as I now send a picture from the web? Why can't my phone tell me where it is, dammit?
There is little reason for anyone to feel such frustration. Technically, the internet treats all information flows alike, as digital data which can be edited, linked, searched, displayed or whatever. More important, it provides a common means of transmitting all of that information. While every previous new media from vaudeville through VHS had to develop its own transmission infrastructure, new new media can simply use the internet.
True, there is a lingering bottleneck in the internet's transmission speed. For most people, connections are still too slow to receive television or movies as broadcast. But that is changing fast. Video is increasingly being downloaded in the background, and then synced across multiple devices—which is the strategy adopted by the iPhone, and still a lot faster and more convenient than a trip to the video rental shop. Google's recent $1.65bn purchase of video-streaming site YouTube demonstrates the height of expectations for video's future on the internet, and thus for media innovation.
The biggest obstacles to media innovation lie in the law and the imagination. In the name of preventing piracy—which all too often translates simply into protecting short-term profits—media corporations have blocked change in ways big and small. Want to keep up-to-date with hot American television shows like Ugly Betty or 30 Rock? Despite the fact that American networks are starting to make them available over the web, they block access from Britain. Similarly, Apple's iTunes music store sells movies and videos in the US, but not elsewhere.
To be consistent, the iPhone should block viewing of American videos when it detects it has roamed on to a non-American cellular network—though if it does it will only highlight the absurdity of the legal restrictions big media is trying to enforce. Over the longer term, the lure of new markets—combined with the threat of piracy—should be enough to bring big media to a reasonable compromise. Which is good—legal innovation to break information and entertainment out of the narrow boxes in which big media companies are trying to contain them is crucial for the next wave of media innovation.
Up until now, media innovations have been rare—largely because it was so expensive to create media-specific infrastructure. So we cast expression in terms of a specific media—a television show, a magazine article, whatever. We communicate as much in terms of media capabilities as what we want to say. Marshall McLuhan's 1967 book, The Medium is the Massage, was an early attempt to break through single-media thinking by making its argument in both words and pictures. (According to McLuhan's son Eric, the title differed from the aphorism because of a printer's error—which McLuhan adopted because he thought it proved his point.) But the internet provides capabilities for mixing media that McLuhan—radical though he was in predicting the impact of global media—couldn't dream of.
Today, the message is the medium. Or at least it should be, if our collective imagination is up to it. So what will the new new media be like? The short answer is that nobody knows, because it really is hard to think outside of the categories of existing media. That said, there are tentative, early signs of a blurring of boundaries: newspaper websites show video, the iPhone organises voicemail messages as a browsable list, "mashups" combine different types of information via the web—restaurant reviews plus maps, say. None of these could seriously be called revolutionary. But the "collide-oscope," as McLuhan called it, has been shaken. Soon we'll see what new patterns start to emerge.
