As TV Goes, So Goes Capitalism

Now that TV is no longer the dominant news and entertainment medium, capitalism as we know it is at stake.

Every once in a while (actually about once a month it seems), the internet breaks a cultural “speed barrier” and upsets long-established media consumption patterns. The polling company Ipsos Reid recently reported that the internet smashed through one such barrier late in 2008, when Canadians began spending more time on the internet than watching television. For the first time since its swift rise to the apex of modern culture some 50 years ago, television no longer has the majority of our attention.

Before we swell with national pride at having achieved this break with the old master of our time, it should be noted that the rest of the industrialized world will quickly follow this pattern. Television is being displaced from the centre of global culture that, until this moment, has been significantly defined by the medium.

Those who work in or follow the television, news, and entertainment sector are by now very familiar with the disruptive force of the internet. Both the networks and the cable companies are scrambling to follow the audience as we migrate online. Their intent is generally the same within each increasingly convergent sector – to ensure that the online audience is watching authorized content in authorized forms and being exposed to the authorized advertising that underwrites commercial media. With newspaper revenue down 27 per cent in 2009 and the music industry equally hard-hit in recent years, television executives are grasping for anything that gives them hope that they won’t follow the same trend.

The main problem for the television sector is that it’s failing to adequately profit from society’s move into cyberspace. They stand to lose billions of dollars as hundreds of millions of online eyeballs stray from the walled garden of the 20th century television industry. A 30-second online ad currently has only a fraction of the profitability as the same ad on television. Furthermore, television content itself migrates to all sorts of unauthorized places on the internet, and it’s highly unlikely the industry will be able to control online content or online viewing and bring audiences back into the network and cable corrals.

Consider that most digital music we download from the internet is pirated. Apple’s iTunes store commands a handsome 70 per cent market share of legal music downloads, but the vast majority of all music coming off the internet is illegal. In all probability, it will be impossible to reassert control over online consumption of digital entertainment products to anywhere near the same degree as was witnessed in the last century.

Yet it’s far too early to write breathless obituaries about our dearly beloved friend. We are in fact generally watching more television than ever before. Also, because of the internet, we’re watching television in a greater variety of places than ever before, in all areas of the social world. So what has changed with the rise of the internet?

Aside from a vast restructuring of the television sector and a significant hit to its revenues (but one that the industry will nonetheless survive), the internet’s primary impact on our viewing patterns may prove to be mainly cultural in nature. Once you get past the enormous sums of money at stake, it’s easier to see that we’re becoming less enchanted with the primary storytelling system of borderless capitalism.

The consumer society of the receding 20th century was largely a product of television. Through television’s unchallenged domination of our entertainment and news habits, a very particular kind of power was wielded by those who owned, operated, or had privileged access to commercial media. That world, and that type of power, is rapidly diminishing.

At stake in the loss of a single dominant commercial medium is capitalism itself as a belief system. We’re told capitalism is the one and only system that ensures democracy, peace, freedom, and choice, and then we’re wrapped in the warm illusions of its storytelling system, which quietly whispers to us, “Keep consuming.” Those illusions worked and worked powerfully when there were fewer competing voices. But now capitalism – perhaps the most monopolistic belief system yet created – has to learn to share.