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New Media are Fundamentally Different than Old Media
In old media, the goal was to get everyone onto the same page. New media are different: for new media (and by new media, I mean machine-readable media– which are also fundamentally different the digital media — machine-readable means the data are encoded in a language that can be “understood” [to mean something] by a computer, rather than being a nonsensical stream of data [such as audio, graphic or video files -- such data will not be "understood"within the next century, perhaps not even within this millenium...] )… — for new media, the goal is to get a high proportion of the target audience onto the page that is topically relevant to that target audience.
For people who are experienced in writing, this notion of the target audience — the “intended reader” is nothing new. Why does it matter here + now?
There was a Blip in the 20th century: The Blip that Became Known as Mass Media
This blip was largely created by technology. It was the Gutenberg Galaxy blip. The Führer blip. The megaphone speaking to everyone blip. Big brother blip. The I speak, you listen blip. Well, just like “Me Tarzan, you Jane”, people will not remain Untertan forever — the whole notion of mass media involving Übermensch and Untertan is outdated: it is no longer appropriate to the world we live in.
What the Concept of Appropriate Technology can Teach Us + How the Advent of Machine-Readable Technology requires a New Approach to Take Hold in the New Media Landscape
Henry Ford said you can have any color you like — as long as it is black. This was the old world of “bigger is better”. Well, this world no longer fits. The philosophy of mass production does not fit a world filled with different people. We have singles, who do not need a van … and we have large families, who cannot all fit onto one motorcycle.
Appropriate technology is all about creating (and using) technology that suits the people rather than forcing people to deal with one-size fits-all mass-produced technology. Appropriate technology is an answer to mass production, much in the same way that different individuals revolt against the hammer that treats them all as if they were uniform, each and everyone merely a standardized nail.
Mass Media are Messages + Ideas Created According to the Mass Production Paradigm
These one-size fits-all messages waste resources in the same way that using only a hammer will be inappropriate for every situation a craftsman will be confronted with – it will limit his/her ability to build differentiated structures that are appropriate to the each and every demand in the broad palette of varied demands of end users.
More May Be Cheaper, But Perhaps Less is Better
Another example: You may build a rocket ship that can travel across the universe to a far away solar system. The cost of travel may be significantly less per mile of travel than building a rocket ship that will only travel to Venus or Mars. Which should we prefer? Or how about building a ship that can be used discover the ocean floor. It would not be required to lift off of the Earth, to travel to Venus or Mars, or to deal with the different situations that might be discovered there.
We may not need more — we may not even want more. Or, said in another way: Perhaps what we want and need is not simply more volume but rather more appropriate for us.
Hammers for Nails, Screwdrivers for Screws, Wrenches for Nuts + Bolts…
We now have advanced technology, we should apply the tools we have at our disposal to get the most appropriate results.
In media, the most appropriate result is to match up questions + answers
Therefore, if I want to know who won the ball game, then hearing “tomorrow will be a sunny day” is inappropriate. Even if a million people are interested in what the weather will be tomorrow, it is not interesting to the person who wants to know something else (namely: who won the ball game?). Likewise, if I want to sell balls, then I will be more interested in directing my message towards people who are interested in balls (and in particular when they are actually interested in buuying a ball) than in sending my message to millions of people, in case maybe 1 or 2 per cent are interested in it.
What is more: if I manage a media channel, I should be very careful not to constantly be pissing off 98-99% of my audience, just in the hope that maybe 1-2% of the audience may find a piece of information to not be painful, obnoxious or otherwise irritating.
Again: This is not NEWS to Anyone who is Familiar with this Space
So what’s the point?
The point is to make the metrics count — they should count what counts! And what counts is reaching the target audience, not hammering some general one-size fits-all message to an undifferentiated population of nails. The vast majority of the one-size fits-all population will be irritated with a one-size fits-all message. In fact: sending such a message will make them believe that the sender is bogus: the company that couldn’t care less about who they are talking to is in fact damaging their own reputation by being careless, unfeeling and impersonal.
So: Where’s the Beef?
The beef is, unfortunately, easier said than done. I do not doubt that there are many many people who already have a lot of experience in this are (probably many have far more experience than I do), but let me oversimplify the proposal into just a couple (totally oversimplified) recommendations:
1. For every message, clearly define the intended audience
2. Figure out the size of that audience, and maybe also something about that audience’s distribution within the global population
3. Try to reach the highest percentage of that audience — and in the most effective way
4. Try to get some kind of feedback from that audience [positive, negative, other] — and also from the complementary (“non-”) audience
5. Evaluate the efficacy of the interaction with both the audience and the non-audience subsets of the population
One Important Caveat
Note that “audience” and “non-audience” are not fixed sets. For example: if I am thirsty, then I become part of the audience for “wanting something to drink“; when I am no longer thirsty, I may leave that audience. This is true for almost any product or service: At any point in time, some people will be entering intothe audience, while other people will be leaving it. This will probably significantly complicate data gathering.
What’s New about New + What’s Old about Old
The way this approach differs from the old “one-size fits-all” approach is perhaps to some degree simply a matter of the level of sophistication used. Indeed, when traditional libraries started using computers to catalog their books, the systems they used at first largely replicated the old-fashioned paper catalogs. However, as time went on, the capacity of the new technology to perform computational data processing changed the way information could be retrieved from the system in such a way that the system itself was in fact revolutionized (for example: with respect to keyword indexing largely replacing classification systems).
Likewise, marketing, advertising and traditional publishing industries should not attempt to hold on to by-gone erasin which everyone would meet on the town square. It is simply no longer the case — or perhaps it never was the case, only now the transparency of the Internet is shedding light on more and more of those areas that are different … and perhaps this long tail of “different from one-size fits-all” — these screwy and different people — perhaps these people are in fact your target audience.
) are more clear headed than their elders: they realize that no one has the single silver bullet — there is no single killer method of precise domination. And this is also one point where 
nmw
