Category: Media

  • Experience Stacks, Competitive Advantage, and Netflix’s “Wednesday”

    The new Netflix series about the daughter from The Addams Family going to a Hogwarts-style high school doesn’t ignore the earlier versions of the story: it embraces them, which is part of why it succeeds. One difference between artificial intelligence and the human kind (at least for now) is that AI is amazing at pattern…

  • Frontiers of Scale

    As media continues to fragment in the face of changes in legislation and technology, where will new big audiences come from? A few issues back, I explored how changes in legislation and technology are signaling the end of cheap digital scale for media. (Don’t worry: you don’t have to read that issue to understand this one.) If…

  • The End of Cheap Scale?

    More important than who owns Twitter is whether anybody can create a massive new social networking service. Also, what would a non-profit version of Twitter—let’s call it Quack—look like? As I wrote last time, I’m taking a break from the endless hand-wringing around Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. The more interesting question is whether anybody can do anything to…

  • Social Media and the Banality of Evil

    Max Fisher’s new book “The Chaos Machine” shows the downside of what happens when companies pursue growth at all costs. In her 1963 book about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Nazi murder of six million Jews during the Second World War, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality…

  • Industry Evolution by Meteor Strike

    Two recent developments in the world of comic books have lessons for all businesses in the age of digital transformation. From the “Big Story You Haven’t Noticed” department: this month, two things happened in the world of comic books that combine to make a huge inflection point. My friend Peter Horan calls this sort of thing…

  • Why Musk is Stalling

    Elon Musk seems to have accepted that he will have to do what he promised and acquire Twitter, but now he is delaying the close of the deal. He has a good reason, but it’s not the one you think. The late Steve Jobs was so persuasive that people said he had a “reality distortion…

  • Mediapocalypse 2025

    Peak TV is here, but it’s not going to last because there isn’t enough audience to go around. The collapse and consolidation is just a bit more than two years away. Here are my predictions. What happens after you reach a peak, any peak? You descend from the height… whether it’s summiting Everest, climbing that hill near…

  • Nostalgia and Pseudo-Nostalgia in TV

    “Happy Days” portrayed the 1950s when the 1950s weren’t even 20 years in the past. Last week saw the premieres of two new series, “Quantum Leap” and “Reboot,” that explore similar territory. For kids in the 1970s the biggest star in the world was Henry Winkler, who played The Fonz on Happy Days. The show was…

  • Frontiers of Live Experience

    New forms of live media experiences are cropping up at different scales, but what are the differences between live and on-demand anyway, and why does it matter? Since the arrival of the VCR and DVR, home video, VOD, podcasting, and streaming, the last few decades have shifted our media consumption from live shared experiences in…

  • Misinformation & “Prebunking,” Experience Stacks & Physical Objects

    A study suggests that inoculating internet users against misinformation might be more successful than fact checking later, but I’m not so sure. Plus, a price sticker triggers a trip down memory lane. The Limits of “Prebunking” in the Fight Against Misinformation A new study in the journal Science Advances, “Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on…