Tencent Retrospective: Thou Shalt Consume

Consumption.

This is what you're doing right now. It's what you do on the commute to work when you listen to a podcast or stream your favourite show. It's reading the news, watching movies, playing games, using apps. You know this. You're aware of the shift over the last few years from 'news' and 'information' (and basically anything mediated through the Internet, television, radio, advertising and the wealth of technologies we use to access those) to 'content'. All manner of information has been reduced to 'content', and likewise you and I and the ways we access and engage information have been reduced. We're not readers, viewers, entrepreneurs, commentators, innovators, participants. We're consumers. We are collectively defined by the basic fact that we use things or absorb them.

As consumers, then, pertinent questions arise about people's relationship to media and information. Are media responding to our independent patterns of information access and technology use? Are news and entertainment media responding to the demands that we are making, with our heightened capability and capacity for consumption, on information and content providers? Or could it be the other way around? As consumers, passive or active, are the ways we consume being consciously directed and even constructed in order to drive traffic to the many websites vying for our attention (because they are, ultimately, companies beholden to shareholders and profits)? The question isn't whether any of this is 'good' or 'bad', but how and why this shift in our relationship with information and its media is taking place.

Tencent's Two Cents

To help read some kind of pulse on this existential/informational throb, the insights provided by some of leaders and veterans of news media who appeared at the Tencent Media Summit, held two weeks ago in Beijing, might shed some light. The event brought in the likes of Jimmy Maymann from the rebranded-for-the-21st-century 'HuffPo' (previously Huffington Post), Mashable CCO (Chief Content Officer) Jim Roberts, BuzzFeed's International VP Scott Lamb and others to join a panel of well-regarded figures in the media industries of China and abroad. 

The Summit featured a chorus of positive assessments of the present and future landscape of media consumption. (With skyrocketing sales of mobile devices and consequent burgeoning population of mobile device users, this optimism is well-founded.) There were frequent and enthusiastic assertions that the reach of mobile connections and mobile devices offered unprecedented advantages for media. As Scott Lamb put it, audiences are predominantly "on the mobile device, and they are looking for content when they first wake up in the morning, or when they are waiting in line to get coffee, when they are on their commute, and during the day at work." Mobile devices mean a perpetual motion machine of content consumption.

Hand in hand with the implacable appetite for content is the variation of getting it. On the new kinds of audiences that mobility of media produce, Jim Roberts said, "I feel that they [audiences] are willing to experiment with different types of information. I think they are getting their sources of information so many different ways and a lot of them are coming to social channels, not necessarily navigating to a traditional provider." Resulting from this (and a recurring message throughout the summit), news media must adapt to their audiences and how audiences consume. Audiences, continued Roberts, are "going to go where they want to, and it's up to us to make sure that our content is where they are. If they are on WeChat then we are going to get our content there. If they are on a new platform that is yet to be invented, we will have our content there." Sounds like power to the people, right? Maybe. You are free, hypothetically speaking, to consume what, where and how you want. The most relevant and competitive media sites and apps are able to cater to your interests and attract your attention. If they don't appeal to you, clearly you won't spend your time on their site. You da boss.

Here comes the 'but'. But, you may not be the final authority on your consumption habits that you or Jim Roberts thinks you are. Because, don't forget, you aren't a reader or viewer anymore. You're a consumer, and critical 'consumers' may do well to at least suspect an industry that precludes any defining characteristic or role for them external to their representation in purely economic terms. Which is to say that when we become consumers of content—essentially, of products—we represent and embody, first and foremost, economic gain.

An example of this in real terms is 'Audience as Distributors', a business model/motto espoused by the Summit's heavyweights. As you can guess, when you read, see or watch something that you like, if you share, tweet/re-tweet or otherwise link it to your social and/or professional network, you have helped distribute a company's content. We see this happening ALL the time. But when we share content we aren't just sharing a thought-provoking article or a sweet slideshow, we're sharing a brand. We become the middlemen and -women, paper boys and girls of the 21st century distributing news and information more actively and broadly than any organisation could hope to do itself. As Jim Roberts said, "we want [people] to like our material so well that they will recommend it to their mothers, their brothers or their girlfriends. [We've] been able to scale our business as much as we have [based] on that sharing impulse." I'm not suggesting that media companies are freeloading off of your 'sharing impulses', I'm stating it outright: that is exactly what they are doing. Our predilection for sharing content is a means of increasing site traffic and audience numbers in order to attract advertisers and generate profit.

This sounds painfully alarmist and anciently Marxist. After all, so what? If by sharing new, interesting, edifying and entertaining content you are directly or indirectly helping media disseminate their brand and attract sponsors and advertisers and sustain their business, isn't that a win-win? Here comes the 'yes, but'.

Yes, But.

Yes, but labour is productive activity especially for the sake of economic gain. 'Audience as Distributors' and similar strategies means exploiting the free labour of consumers. Now, we can hardly conceive of having a vibrant and engaging media landscape without vibrant and engaging audiences who share links along with opinions; it would be futile, anyway, to suggest people stop sharing on the Internet. Sharing is why and how the Internet exists. Nonetheless we should recognise that this environment is produced through our collective exploitation. This exploitation may result in companies generating more cool content we care about, but the bottom line is profit-through-consumption. Your interests are being monetised, your Likes tallied, the amount of time you spend reading this versus that article quantified and, as Jimmy Maymann advocated during his keynote speech, your content is being personalised.

If audiences represent economic gain above all, the point of information is no longer to be informed, but rather the economic act of its consumption. When Jim Roberts said "I actually think the mobile environment is a gift, because it means that anywhere there's a signal you can consume," there is something haunting as well as promising about his implication. Also, this neoliberal kind of numbers-tracking and efficiency-making has the potential to atomise information instead of cultivate it. Part of the beauty of the Internet is its chaos, its ability to bring us into contact with different opinions and sources of information. Tools to help us seek out what is relevant, what we need or want to know, can be indispensable because without them the Internet can be a haywire cacophony. Yet while it's natural to seek information that appeals to us or that confirms what we hold to be true, narrowing the scope of our access to content specifically tailored for us seems to guarantee deafening the plurality of voices and sources the Internet makes available to us.

If there is a solution, it's got to be bloody complicated. Tencent's Media Summit largely featured issues on how to best tailor and qualitatively and quantitatively measure media and content for consumers. Such content and methods seek to guide interests to drive profits, and consumers should be wary of the economic motivation and manipulation underlying even their most basic and casual content surf. At the same time there's no denying that either compensating consumers for the labour of their Liking and Tweeting or moving to curtail or administer how audiences share content are ridiculous at best and authoritarian at worst. At present consumers can either choose exploitation or ignorance, and it isn't yet clear that these are distinct options...