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We’ve all been getting our knickers in a knot about Murdoch’s moaning and subsequent surge to Planet Paywall, but we (myself included) have been forgetting one vital point: This is the man that put TV behind a paywall. And then he sold it to everyone.

Back in 1990 when BSkyB (the combination of the 1986-launched BSB and 1989-launched Sky) brought us a brave new world of broadcasting, critics claimed that it would never take off/would wreck our cultural compass.

Why would anyone pay for TV – especially the early offerings of satellite TV – when we had four perfectly good channels already? AND we’d already paid a licence fee to access those.

Secondly, TV was a slightly murky, slightly ‘common’ medium. Not unlike the charges levelled at NOTW and The Sun. People who liked that kind of stuff would never pay…

Fast forward to 2009. Despite an extra terrestrial channel and the invention of freeview, Sky TV is as ubiquitous in the homes of British people as big chavolines. And it’s not just us proles, it’s the full gambit from rich landowners down.

Sun readers are Sky TV subscribers. So is everyone else. We’re a nation willing to pay extra for exclusive content bundles – so long as it’s the right stuff in those bundles, at the right prices, with technologically useful, easy ways to access.

Murdoch didn’t buy up existing channels and sell them back to us, once he purchased BSB to fold in to his Sky venture, he collected unique content, the best of the best, and flashy hardware that people wanted. Sky TV was a status symbol for the masses AND a utility to the upper classes.

Free isn’t a status symbol. And you can argue that BSkyB rode the wave of the ‘Loadsa Money’ era. But we’re currently wading through a recession and Sky subscriptions are riding high.

So is Murdoch going to deliver the Sky Plus of online content retrieval and aggregation?

Is Murdoch going to bring us the 24, Lost and The Simpsons of online news and features?

Will News Corp. plunge funds into developing the Next Big Thing in broadband or ‘cloud’ technology, an equivalent advancement to HDTV?

Will The Sun (or its parent bundle) snag the rights to first-play online Premiership football highlights that Virgin Media currently owns?

Does the new walled garden planned by The Sunday Times have the online content equivalent of The Wire up its sleeve? Ready to prove that, far from erode critical and creative integrity, internet platforms could bring in a new dawn of clever content.

God, I really hope so. Because whatever you may think of the man and his empire, the media world would be far less interesting if Murdoch bricked himself and the ambitions of mass paid-for content into an embarrassing tomb.

Holly Seddon

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Rupert Murdoch’s decision to erect a paywall around his online news sites isn’t about the death of free content, or a battle of business models: it’s about the death of compulsory innovation.

New media blogger Jeff Jarvis has long been the leading – or militant – anti-paywall advocate yet. But it’s more his ability to highlight how much better life can be if we drop our old school mentality that no longer fits the new world that makes his views important to me. The professor of journalism is to old media what Richard Dawkins is to old religion: living and very vocal proof that there is a better way of looking at things. Unfortunately for the two of them, it’s a new way that is obscured by panic, a fear of the unknown and inertia about having to start from the bottom after working your way to the top.

Rather than bother to read Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, religion has held steadfast in its beliefs, often going backwards to protect its moral – and financial – foothold around the world.

Likewise, news organisations like Murdoch’s News Corporation, have had a golden opportunity to re-evaluate their role in the world. Likewise, new ideas came along that shook their ivory tower at the foundations. Likewise, they had the reach, brains, power and finances needed to achieve revolution, and likewise they bottled it. Instead of rebuilding, adapting or moving in the face of destruction, they decided to fortify using the same building blocks as before.

You can argue that Murdoch et al hung on to the bitter end, losing billions of pounds and watching countless titles close, and you’d be partly right. I for one didn’t expect them to hold on for so long and to lose so much before buckling under pressure. But it’s important to recognise that this capitulation by mainstream media isn’t about a failure on new business models; it’s about a failure to find new business models. And that doesn’t particularly bode well for the future, where the chasm between what we want and what MSM is willing to offer, will only get bigger.

James Seddon

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If Alexander Graham Bell owned a time machine when he invented the telephone all those years ago, would he have bothered putting in all that work? In my 29 years I’ve had more than my fair share of what others would call pointless telephone conversations, just laughing, quoting my favourite TV shows and sharing the minutae of my day. Of course he would. The phone may have been used to call in randsom demands in kidnappings, but it has also been used to avoid war and everything inbetween. It’s not the medium that’s important, it’s the message. Yes Twitter allows users to post nonsense – see recent BNP-related posts – but it has also been used to rally Iranian protestors attempting to see democracy overcomes a fixed election. And everything inbetween, including yes, what people are having for lunch.

Yet this banal describing of your day’s activity – what head of social media at Guardian, Meg Pickard, calls the cheese sandwich effect – is what naysayers keep focussing on.

Pickard, whose speech at the Royal Instituition I’ve just left, came under fire from one audience member who was very aggressive about the cheese sandwich effect, saying kids are ‘wasting time’ on this ’social experiment’.

But what I fail to see is what’s new? Kids have always socialised in ways adults can’t understand. And, perhaps more importantly, who’s to say which topics and methods of conversation are pointless? I have two step-kids who are six and seven and both want to join a social network all of their friends are on. Would I prefer them to be physically socializing? Yes, but it isn’t an either or situation and it isn’t my decision what type of social interaction best strengthens their bonds. Their bonds.

Personally I’ve learned more from Twitter in the last six months than I have from books – and those were books that were recommended by people I follow on Twitter. If I conversed with morons, my conversations would be moronic. If I phoned an uneducated person to talk Nietzsche I’d be left disappointed. Would that be the telephone’s fault? Connections are what’s important, not the medium of connection.

And perhaps most importantly, no one forces you to connect. The connections you make online will reflect the type of person you are outside of any digital network. Porn stars don’t mix with priests online, birds of a feather truly do flock together, as the saying goes. If you like listening to Britney, you will gravitate towards Britney fans – or they’ll at least gravitate towards you. And that’s whether you are online or offline. All social media allows us to do is what we’ve always done: find like-minded people. The real revolution is how easy that connection is to make nowadays.

So, if you find yourself online having a conversation about what someone had for lunch, perhaps you need to realise that you’re partly to blame, not the system or tools that allow you to connect to whomever you please.

James Seddon

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