Could media fragmentation have been predicted?

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?

Comments

[EU Serf]

My experience with most senior business managers is that they are focused on two things.
Today's problems & the current business trends.

Few of them ever think on a deep level about anything original. Many of them are probably unaware of the concepts you are talking about.

[Simon]

Thanks, EU Serf.

There's obviously a niche for someone there! Any takers?