Towards a Theory of Yurtification

Today I was asked a good question. It’s not an new question but I’ve never really been able to formulate a decent answer to it. Are we seeing the dawn of a new age of equality? Or is power and influence just going to shift from one part of society to another? Lately I’ve been thinking the latter is the right answer but it seems to leave something out, or assuming that while things change they’ll essentially stay the same.

Let’s start of with a graph. Cos you know I love a nice power law distribution graph.

Here’s how The Media traditionally works:

On the far left you’ve got the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the people who can afford to advertise in their media. Not many of them and a lot of reach. And on the right you’ve got everyone else with the theoretical ability to publish media but not much reach. Media’s an easy one but you could also apply this to knowledge – tenured academics have resources that the rest of us don’t. But let’s stick with media.

As old media outlets are weakened thanks to technological change something has to fill that vacuum. Surely a new business model will emerge and while the old companies might not be at that far left someone will be and the graph will pretty much look the same.

But in this new world everyone on the right is publishing much more than they were and even if their reach is low it’s still significant in aggregate. A billion five minutes videos getting 10 views is 50 billion minutes of attention that the big players aren’t getting. So while the power law distribution is still in play it’s shifted somewhat.

It’s at this point that my thoughts turned to yurts. I think the future of media distribution looks a little like this:

Bear with me on this one…

Originally I was thinking the media distribution currently looks like like a teepee but when I looked at photos of a teepee it didn’t seem right. What I actually had in mind was more of a volcano like this:

(That’s the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines.)

If you chop the photo in half you get the power law distribution graph:

Well, sort of. But you get the idea. Now, let’s superimpose the yurt on to the volcano and stick some numbers on it.

At point 1 you’ve got the kings of all media. They’re still the ones with the most reach. But the fall off from them isn’t so steep. Those at point 2 have increased their reach a bit while those at point 3 have increased their reach at lot meaning the difference in reach between 1 and 3 isn’t as great as it was.

I threw in point 4 as an afterthought but it’s actually really important. 2 and 3 have increased their power and influence at the expense of 1 through adoption of what we currently call social media but those at 4 aren’t using this stuff so have stayed where they were, only instead of a slope up to the top there’s a sudden, sharp incline. Obviously this is only there because I superimposed a photo of a yurt on a volcano but fits current thinking about the digital divide and needs to be considered when thinking about these things.

So that’s my Yurtification theory. In short, the pyramid will be softened, Mongolian style.