real world columns: broadcasting

What’s the difference between junk email and bell- ringing? No it’s not a bad joke, it’s a consideration of broadcasting. First, let us clarify ‘broadcasting’. One-to-one communication has been around for a long time. Recent technological advances have allowed us to do the same activity but remotely, via post, telephones, fax and internet messaging. What I want to consider here is one-to-many communication. The earliest variations on this were public talking; tribal leaders addressing their followers, generals addressing their troops, and in the field of entertainment there were traveling players and village bards. The interesting things start happening when one-to-many communication goes remote. Then we are on to ‘broadcasting’.

Normally we think of broadcasting in terms of media such as television and radio, but the idea of technology assisting in one-to-many communication has been around for a long time before that. One particular example is the bells of the village church. These were used to bring the local community together for all sorts of things, and it wasn’t just centuries ago; even as recently as the 1940s bells were still reserved for signaling the alarm in England during the Second World War.

Centuries ago the scope of messages that bells communicated were wider however. They brought the village together and communicated big events such as weddings and deaths as well as signaling festivities and alarms. In a world before time-measuring technology they were also the central timekeeper for village life, dictating the movement of cattle, gathering for religious festivals and a host of other activities in the village calendar. At about the same time other broadcast technologies existed with similar ranges and limitations. Drumming in the African continent. Smoke signals practiced by North American Indians etc.

With bellringing the target groups were very localized (the local villagers) and as such they were well served by broadcasting to a spatially based target group. Everybody within earshot of the bell would fall nicely into the target group. Deaths of local people, festivities, marriages, the people who had lived there all their lives and who would be interested in these things would hear the bells. Those who lived elsewhere and weren’t interested wouldn’t hear them.

These days the rise in different disciplines, specializations, hobbies, jobs, interests, coupled with the mobility of today’s population means that there is only a small interest in things that happen in the locality and people are far more likely to have their informational needs met by other means than listening out for the village bells. TV and radio are today’s broadcasting technology and they broadcast to the whole country. This type of broadcasting really is blanket broadcasting; sending the same information to many millions of people. There is a hint of target groups though; the broadcasting can be adjusted to serve the information only to certain groups of people, but the tools to do this are very imprecise; basically the time that the program is broadcast and the channel that it is broadcast on will govern who sees it.

With the introduction of the web as a broadcast medium the blanketness and the targeting have both become more extreme. Extreme blanketness is typified by the rise in Spam (junk) email. Email is sent to millions of people in the hope that it applies to one or two hundred of them. If the tide of spam I get were demographically profiled then somewhere I would be listed as a bald, deeply in debt, homeowner who snores heavily during his sleepless nights and needs new ink cartridges daily for his printer.

The wonder of the web is that the technology is there to do the opposite; to target information very precisely at individual users, so called ‘database marketing’. The information then becomes less a case of advertising and more a case of supplying the user with information that is useful to them. The jargon for this used to be ‘point-casting’; rather than casting your information ‘broadly’ you cast it to a well-defined point, tailor-made for each individual user. The challenge of interactive, web technology is not to give us as much information as possible but to filter us from the deluge of information that is out there.

To return to spam and bell-ringing; imagine if there was such a thing as bell-ringing spam. It would be something like being able to hear the messages of the bells of every church up and down the whole country. ‘Mark Bookman has died’ - so what, never even knew the chap. ‘There’s a Spring Festival at Nunney’; no good to me, I don’t live there. ‘Matchlocke Hall is on fire everyone come and help!’; I’ve got a bucket … but it would take me a week to get there.