One common trait unifies today’s successful and exciting media formats, services and brands: they are reductionist. They peel away layers and reorganize distribution and experience in new ways:
- Reductionist formats: Think mp3, jpeg, newsfeeds (rss). These formats reduce file sizes and strip away packaging until only the bare bones of digital “content” is left.
- Reductionist services: Search engines, feed readers, news aggregators, photo collectors, mp3 players. They impose new order and function on the core elements left by the reductionist formats.
- Reductionist brands: Google, iPod. Their raw material is reductionist. By becoming the number one global distributor of raw media material, these brands themselves loom larger in our imagination than the artist, newspapers and TV channels that produce the “content”.
Form follows function: There’s more than fashion that dictates the stripped, functionalist style of the Google start page and the iPod. What’s intriguing about the reductionist world is that so far there are so few such brands. I am a Bloglines addict, but the service itself lacks the aura of Google and iPod – it’s ugly. It becomes clear – too clear – that the effect of newsfeeds is to split into atoms the whole publishing environment that editors and producers put great effort into nurturing. In Bloglines, a New York Times story that cost thousands to produce looks the same as my last blog entry.
This must be a potential problem for publishers: How to go with the flow of reductionism without flattening themselves in the process. And we still don’t have the text-iPod. Or the read-write iPod. Who will make it?
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