Thread by @jeffjarvis

I think we might be seeing the last supernova of scale. Scale was required in the age of mass media but that age, my friends, is at its dusk. Every last newspaper trapped in the evil hedge-witch's cabin & pureplays all huddling against the cold are last-ditch efforts to be big.

https://twitter.com/asharma/status/1470462867359125509

Will mergers to scale make these companies better able to compete with Google, FB, et al? I think not. The platforms & the rollups will all fight over what is left of the attention-based ad market. That scrabble will go on for awhile.....

In the meantime, others try for scale outside of the ad market: Spotify trying to buy up all the podcasts; Substack trying to lure all the newsletter writers. Apart from some marketing advantage, I see no necessary role for scale in subscription products.....

In a sense, WordPress is the most successful effort to gain scale in a creator economy and it doesn't try to exploit that scale in terms of advertising or subscriptions; it is a service to a market that scales itself.....

So what would a post-scale media market look like? Now that's what interests me. That's why I'm working on a new initiative in internet studies to get students to explore what might be.....

I'm also working on a book proposal that is ostensibly about something else but is actually about the roots of mass media and scale. It shows me how recent the imperative for scale is. I don't think it's forever.....

At the end of the 1800s a similar phenomenon occurred: Suddenly, it was possible for many more people to start magazines. Many did. Many failed. Then came consolidation.

In a sense, @cmcilwain tells a similar story in his wonderful oral history, Black Software: Suddenly, people could open new spaces for Black culture online. Some failed. Consolidation followed (AOL). But as @DocDre recounts in Distributed Blackness something new followed....

In the manuscript for my not-yet-published book on the Gutenberg Age, I posit that @DocDre's Distributed Blackness might offer us a model for conversation (formerly known as media) controlled by communities. That could be a radical new future for media....

When we start talking about distributed and federated models for media, it won't be long before somebody brings up the blockchain. I have no idea whether that will have a role because I don't start with the technology anymore; I start with the need and opportunity.....

I see many possible futures for post-scale media & public conversation. I see few futures for agglomerations of old and not-so-old media companies trying to reach scale. They will just fight for the scraps of what's still growing after the meteor called the internet struck Earth.

To be clear, I greatly admire @Bankoff, @BenjLerer + @peretti. They are our greatest business innovators in media. They are doing what they need to do in the market they are in. They do need scale. What I'm saying is that that market is changing.