The Economist is written from a devoutly business-centric point of view and it makes no bones about this. Reading the section in its new media survey examining the demise – real or otherwise – of ‘traditional’ media I was struck by the glaring evidence of how slow media institutions (and advertising ones for that matter) have been to react to media fragmentation.

Rupert Murdoch (in case you need it!!) is quoted as saying that young readers "don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important."

When I was an under (and post-) graduate, the concept of post-structuralism was a well established philosophy that could be used to repeatedly demonstrate that established ideologies and concepts were being broken down, de-centralised or ‘fragmented’.

In literature this is the unifying voice of the author/narrator or even the concept of ‘the novel’. But its ideas were/are also applied to culture, and I suppose by extension, to society.

So the question needing to be asked is: why was business (here the media industry) so slow to react to something so evident in other, non-commercial areas?

Businesses routinely use market analysts to sift data to give better intelligence, so where your business reaches into the distinctly non-scientific realm of the public (recognised as a law unto themselves as long ago as Bernays!) why not use ‘analysts’ to gauge public sentiment?

This lack of ‘market intelligence’ may be due to the fact that newspaper readers were also slow to adapt to this fragmentation and as such a paper’s mass readership may not have shown any signs of fragmentation.

And this is probably related to the fact that prior to the Web 2.0 ‘boom’, the mass implementation of ideas central to media fragmentation (blogs, social media etc) were also prevented by the limited availability of technology – all of which has changed dramatically.

Giovanni Rodriguez at the Eastwikkers blog has recently suggested that anthropologists should become further involved in the ‘New’ PR industry. This seems like a no-brainer to me…. But perhaps the use of anthropologists would have also helped media institutions predict or foresee the looming media fragmentation articulated through the rise of blogs etc…

One more thing….. paradoxically one of the reasons media businesses probably didn’t think to use anthropologists to analyse their ‘market (ie the public) is because this, too, would have been inconceivable to traditional thinking.

That is, if business couldn’t foresee fragmentation of the media world, then it would undoubtably not have been able to accept the break down of business disciplines and turn to alternative (ie non-scientific) sources of business data.

Make any sense?

Richard Bailey beat me to it… but The Economist’s new media survey is still a great concise history of new media. There’s nothing too ground-breaking in there, but nevertheless it reassuringly provided me with a few tit-bits about new media’s background that I missed out on first-time around.

Specific highlights will follow, but general conclusions include:

• the survey would certainly help convey to Amanda Chapel the potential gravity of the new media shift in response to her comments here on Neville Hobson’s blog

• I love the irony spotted by Antony Mayfield regarding paywalled online content

• If nothing else, it reassured me that if I want to stay abreast of new media developments, then there is no better place than reading around the blogcircle itself.

Could media fragmentation have been predicted ? to come…..

After the build up… I couldn’t find me a copy of this week’s Economist for love nor money! Richard Bailey tells me he gets his in the post tomorrow, so maybe he’ll scoop me on the survey results after all!

In the meantime this week’s PR Week editorial [paywalled] highlights some interesting findings from the WPP Bellwether report.

The report shows that in the first three months of 2006, ‘traditional media’ [sic] budgets were cut for the sixth successive quarter. PR Week UK’s editor, Daniel Rogers, suggests that this may be in response to the wider high-street slow down, but also notes that specialist PR areas, such as healthcare and finance appear to be doing well.

Similarly, WPP chief exec, Sir Martin Sorrell is quoted as saying: "New media and technologies are growing rapidly as clients question the value of traditional media."

All good news for bloggers… made even better by Rogers’ closing remarks:

"Anecdotally, PR consultancy heads report that many clients now insist that new media monitoring and even specific blogging solutions are included in pitches. PR agencies, it seems, are well placed to take advantage of the growing need to cope with the changing landscape."

As mentioned in previous posts, I have been mulling over the scope of this blog now that I have reached – and passed – the critical three month mark. I’ll be blogging about these thoughts and about clarifiying the direction of the blog shortly (as eternally promised!). But for the time being, Daniel Rogers has done a good job already.

Well, I posted about its coming two weeks ago… but it’s finally here: The Economist’s new media survey is out today. Economist surveys are characteristically good, so I have high hopes for this one.

I haven’t seen any of it yet and (oh, the irony) I prefer to buy and read a hard copy of The Economist so I’m off to the shops at lunchtime. For those of you who want a taster… there’s a leader on the survey here.

Who’s going to post first about the survey…. bets anyone?

Just when you thought it was safe to claim you’re up-to-date with MySpace, it turns out the kids are already one-step ahead!

Antony Mayfield posted only yesterday about Mysapce being ‘lame’ according to his 15 year-old brother. Add to that the shame of being owned by News Corp when you have a notoriously switched on audience base and it looks like the MySpace bubble is set to burst.

Further evidence of this comes today in an Observer article about the website Faceparty.

Now I’ve never heard of it… but it seems the kids (and others) have, and in their droves.

In the interests of research I took a quick tour around the site (which proudly declares itself as the "biggest party in the world"!) and it looks like it has been around for at least four years. It also runs events which appear geared towards a much older audience (ie. 20-30 year-olds!) than the 16-19 year olds quoted in the Observer.

I’ll keep an eye on face party and see what happens.

Tom Murphy also posted about another (probably not) new site called Bebo last week…. I’m not even going to pretend I know what that’s all about!

Any ideas someone? Anyone?