Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

The Herbert Read Lecture

The Future of the Media in the Digital Age

by Colin Philpott, Director of the National Media Museum, Bradford

The media landscape in the UK and across the world is changing rapidly. Many traditional media outlets are struggling and new media platforms are springing up all the time. We are in the middle of a media revolution driven partly by technology, partly by global economic and political forces and partly by changing human behaviour. Where is this all leading? Is it for the good?
Colin Philpott is Director of the National Media Museum in Bradford. He’s also on the Council of the Advertising Standards Authority and previously worked for the BBC for 24 years as a journalist, documentary maker and editorial leader. He was Head of the BBC in Yorkshire from 1997 to 2004.
Colin will try to make sense of the seismic shifts in media communication happening before our eyes and make some predictions for the future.

Report
by Ken Hutson

Citing Gutenberg’s15th-century invention of moveable type as a turning point, this former BBC documentary maker pointed to the 1980s as a period of similarly significant change, with the advent of digital technology  in the form of personal computers, mobile phones and the Internet.

Today, we decide when and where to receive news.  This shifts power to consumers and changes the way producers and advertisers think about audiences. Cheap technology enables individuals to produce their own material, such as using mobile phone cameras to record events, and post it on the Web. Though this raises questions about regulation, quality control, payment, and the effect on society, an information age must be good for democracy.

The Web will increasingly dominate the media. And though trusted brands like the BBC should survive, newspapers – facing huge financial challenges as advertising moves to the internet – may become less a source of news more a record of events. The suggestion that ‘thought transference’ technology might be a future possibility seemed quite shocking.