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Patrick Callioni
Patrick Callioni, Chief General Manager, Information Economy, NOIE
I was also concerned that the earlier discussion was all based on a simple paradigm: content equals product. You might ask what is wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with that in itself. However, I think that the Internet and new technologies could do much more than simply give us another way to develop product and dump it on people’s tables. The Internet can provide us with connectivity: so, for me, content is important as a way of establishing connections amongst people, not simply as a way to dump product and make money out of it. I am not saying that people should not go out there and make money from it. This is a free enterprise society, and go for it if you can, although it will become harder and harder to do that. But if we are not looking at content in the new media as more than just product, I think that we risk missing the point of what is going to happen over the next 15 to 20 years.
It is true that in the media as a business, content will become more and more aggregated and power will become more and more concentrated. However, it is also true that if we use the Internet and technologies to build communities, we can actually grow something else as well: we can use content to develop Australians’ capacity to live in their communities and relate to each other. There is lots of evidence that connective communities end up relating better at a human level. If you have people connected in a community, they will start by sending each other emails but eventually they will want to get together and meet. There is empirical evidence to support that. So, we have a lot of potential for content to be used not just to make money; I am not devaluing making money: everyone needs to pay taxes so that I can get paid, but that is only part of the point. I think that ultimately we will arrive at a position that sees content as a way of connecting people, rather than connecting people with technology. Content will be a way of stimulating innovation, which will create opportunities for Australian business in a more competitive and difficult world, and it will also add value to individuals’ lives. We will miss those opportunities if we miss the point that there will be a convergence not just of technologies but, as someone said in an earlier session, of content as well.
As well as turning innovations into commodities, the globalised economy very quickly gives us homogenised content and culture. It is not simply American culture writ large; it is a much more sophisticated process than that. But it will give us a homogenised culture where it is much more difficult to discern individual countries’, societies’ and regions’ values in a grey morass of re-purposed content. That is a very nice bit of Orwellian language, that. What people call ‘re-purposed’, I call ‘mass customised’. We take the same ingredients, we repackage them slightly, and we sell them to somebody else, pretending it is ‘value-adding’. I don’t see it as value-adding: it may be a good way to make money, but it is not value-adding. All that we are doing is taking the same old ingredients, repackaging them across a new medium, and flogging them to people. If that is all that this industry can do, then we are missing an opportunity.
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