The corporate Net

There is nothing new under the sun -- or in cyberspace, for that matter. It's no longer news to anyone that an increasing number of traditional media outlets are being held by an increasingly smaller group of companies. But now it's happening on the Net. NBC's recent buyout of Snap and the minority stake it also took in CNet's news operation is the latest example of a concentration of ownership in new media that makes me twitchy.

The danger for the Net is that media concentration "in here" will produce the same results we've seen "out there" in mainstream media. Fewer independent voices, less diversity of opinion -- a brave new medium made safe for advertisers, where argument and idiosyncratic ideas are pushed to the fringe.

NBC, owned by General Electric and part-owner with Microsoft in MSNBC, is by no means alone in its quest to gobble up cyberspace. Time-Warner ate CNN a few years ago and, by extension, CNN Interactive. ABC, owned by Disney, also owns ABCNews.com.

"I think that the increasing concentration of media in general has been a terrible thing," says Dan Kennedy, media critic for the Boston Phoenix. "The problem now is that we're getting away from media that you can have any hope of regulating," he says.

Once upon a time, the Federal Communications Commission would prevent this sort of concentration of media, predicated on the theory of scarcity of the airwaves, Kennedy says. "Well what on Earth are you going to do now? There's nothing you can do. Certainly the Internet is not a limited resource," he says, "and it doesn't strike me that any self-respecting free-speech junkie could propose a damn thing to do about it unfortunately."

News lite
But no one can corner the market on the Internet, for anything, be it media or entertainment. Cyberspace is too vast, isnt it? That vastness itself might be the danger.

Just as in the print and broadcast world, where very few people ever find the small independent voices, the same is true on the Internet, Kennedy says.

Traditional media concentration has been "devastating for investigative reporting, which hardly exists anymore, diverse point of view, which hardly exists anymore," says Jon Katz, media critic for Rolling Stone and columnist for HotWired. "You can look at whole areas like religion, sex, death, they become taboos," for traditional media, he says.

Katz says big media exists to make information safe.

That's why "op-ed pages have become boring and dull and no real opinions expressed, just a left and a right. There's two points of view everywhere in modern media and they are all balanced. And you are seeing exactly the same phenomena happen now in cyberspace," he says.

Netizens are lulled into a false sense of well-being because they think that because everyone has a computer, they all have a voice, too, Katz says. "This is completely false because what happens is that when you get this concentration of bigness and money these companies can offer things that others can't offer" and when that happens, "they tend to suck all the life out of everything around them," he says.

All other voices become marginalized, Katz says. "It's not like they don't exist, it's like they become insignificant," he says. Katz calls this the 'Village Voice Syndrome," alluding to the alternative publication that once had an influential voice, but has now been pushed to the fringe by mass media that it carries no weight at all.

"We're at the end of the first digital era," Katz says, 'which is defined by ... hackers and free spirits, ranters and ravers [in cyberspace]. We're moving into the era of big marketers where they are going to make the Web safe for mass media -- which means making it tepid, making it cautious and making it less individualistic."

Homogenized democracy
The Net has thrived on letting a million voices rise and fall in a kind of raucous, free-flowing atmosphere that welcomed all comers. "The great miracle of the Web was this explosion of individual voices -- many of them bizarre, weird, angry, strange, interesting," says Katz.

"But you had a million points of view. And they were all out there more or less equally. This does not happen in big media, it just doesn't."

There is a reason that traditional media is seeing a spiraling downward trend in its audience share. TV viewing has declined steadily for years. The newspaper industry, while overall numbers remain relatively steady, is seeing a graying of its audience. Fewer younger readers pick up a newspaper on a daily basis. This same demographic is increasingly turning to the Net for news and information. But for how long?

If online media becomes merely a digital clone of its traditional counterpart, duplicating the same tepid, cautious output, we're all in trouble.

There's no such thing as homogenized democracy. Our democratic culture flourishes because all voices, all viewpoints can, in theory, participate in the sometimes painful process of creating a stronger union. And cyberspace, the freest medium for discourse we have, is now in danger of marginalizing those voices.