The Great Transformation

When most people talk about the media, they describe the content—what is being reported and why they should read it. They often tend to miss other crucial issues. How does any content find an audience? What is the technology that allows mass reproduction of content? What are the costs of running a media platform? What is the revenue model? And how does all of this change in the digital age?

I entered the media through the world of technology. As much by accident as by design, I was at the centre of the key transformations brought about by digitisation. I had started as a mechanical engineer before switching to the study of control systems in power plants for my doctoral thesis at Jawaharlal Nehru University, which I never completed. This led me to work at the National Thermal Power Corporation and, later, at a private consultancy, where I designed systems to acquire digital data and control major power plants. I was, therefore, an early entrant in the digital arena.

While the digital age evolved in various fields, from data-processing and weather prediction to warfare, its public consumption began with the advent of the internet. Initially developed for military and academic purposes, its exponential growth around the turn of the millennium started with Google and Facebook, each of which found different sets of users. After becoming the market leader in search engines, Google expanded significantly with its acquisition, in 2006, of YouTube, assuming control over the largest platform for creating and sharing video content. Facebook, meanwhile, established itself as the place where people built communities, sharing their views, photos and videos—a position it consolidated by later acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp.

The question these transformations posed, and still do, to the media is this: how would the internet change the way news is delivered to the reader, listener or viewer? Or, to restate it, how would people consume news in the digital age? Would the internet make it possible for content creators—either individuals or small organisations—to bypass the major news platforms that control print and television? Or would the legacy media reinvent itself and migrate to the internet, recreating its existing monopoly there?