Media 1.0 and Coordination Arbitrage
Let's add to the list of RIP drivers - those that are disrupting the industry economics and dominant strategies of yesterday - for Media 1.0 what I call a coordination asymmetry.
What's that? That in many industries, firms can organize production more efficiently than other forms; so it's (or used to be) more efficient to organize production in firms, than in, for example, markets or communities.
This results in things like a
huge oversupply of actors - because only a few firms can coordinate production of media, the demand for actors is almost totally inelastic.
But I think this is about to change, and watching how entrepreneurs arbitrage coordination asymmetries - how they utilize new models to make coordinating outside firms just as efficient as inside firms - is going to be one of the most interesting economic events in years.
Not least because the media industry thinks it's immune to economic discontinuities: not a single studio exec, newspaper exec, editor, publishers, etc believes they can get arbed like this. Of course,
they already are.
But when smart entrepreneurs begin arbitraging this coordination asymmetry - by, for example, utilizing the huge oversupply of actors, a few good ideas, cheap production technology, the www to manage everything, and begin distributing microchunked, plastic, liquid media directly or virally.
My kid sister is young enough to think that MySpace is corporate and lame. How do you think her generation is going to express and define itself?
