I was listening to the Huey Lewis song ‘Happy To Be Stuck with You’ and the line that goes ‘We share the same phone number, all the same friends and the same address’ got me thinking. Couples who are living together are really not so inexorably linked as they once were – they might still share a landline number and a physical address, but almost certainly they will have their own mobile phone number, their own email address and individual access to other communication services such as social networking sites. I don’t actually know whether there is any research that demonstrates the effect of this move towards communication infrastructure that is individualised and unshared on how people form relationships and maintain them, but it seems interesting to me.
It’s also a segueway into a discussion about what is happening to the media landscape. Just as couples sharing a house used to be limited to sharing the same communications infrastructure, and as Huey Lewis suggests, this made them happy to be stuck together, perhaps it was also true that these same people were happy to be stuck with the services of various media companies because there were so few alternatives. Now that there are alternatives, it will be interesting to see how fickle the loyalties of media consumers will become, and how fractured the media landscape will become, as large operators are replaced with a myriad of small operators.
We’ve already seen The Bulletin shut its doors for the last time, and reading between the lines, it seems that the fickleness of media consumers was to blame for the demise of this once extremely influential publication, with PBL Media citing falling circulation numbers as more and more people turned to the Internet for their news and opinion. It begs asking this question then – what are people looking for in their media and is continued excellence in production of innovative and original content the key to survival in the digital media age?
