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I continue my series imagining different cultural, technical, and economic trends using myself as a lens. We’ve met a Steve who was in on the work-from-home craze of the early 90s, a Steve that watched Ohio’s high-speed rail boom of a similar era. Now let’s meet a very divergent Steve, in a world where big media empires crumbled – for the most part.
TRANSCRIPT FROM SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY RADIO: Professor Steven Savage on “TeachMeet”
Hello everyone out there! It’s your favorite lecturer on media history and the law, and by favorite I of course mean the only one. And that’s even my entire job!
So let’s get to my big announcement, one that’ll appeal to all twelve of you that took my “Media Turning Points” two-hundred level course. Can all you dozen please tell your friends?
My friend Serdar Yegulalp – yes, the guy you see in Rolling Stone – is coming to campus to speak on his new book “The Empire Of Media.” It’s his latest novel, a noir-deco tale of an alternate history where five giant corporations control world media. There’s murder, mayhem, skulduggery, and rich people doing awful things to each other. Now as much as we enjoy a good alternate history that involves annoying people killing each other, there’s even more!
You may ask why you haven’t heard of this novel yet. Well, that’s because it got released on the East Coast by Penguin. It hasn’t made it’s way here yet because, well, we all know how that works. But it also lets me speak with him on my next book – because we wrote ours together. Plus I get to ride his coattails.
Yes, some of you heard because I can’t shut up, but my next non-fiction book (with less murder) is coming out via Omnipress. It’s “The Lost Empire of Culture” and it’s going to explore how we got here in the world of media, communications, and ownership. Not interesting you say? More rich people being horrible? Well stay tuned.
Serdar and I wrote our books together because one thing that people forget – besides you specific twelve students, thanks again – is that we nearly had a world where only a few oversized corporations owned most of the media. Yes, you may have heard it, but he asks what happens if that was real, and I explore how we dodged not so much a bullet but an atomic bomb.
Imagine Disney as a dominant economic and cultural force, instead of a cautionary tale and favorite political target of politicians before you were born. Not many people remember the Berne Convention walkout of 1993. Or perhaps you’d like to get back to skullduggery as I dissect how several media companies, while pretending to cooperate, ended up backstabbing each other.
As you’ve heard me say, we dodged a world where ownership of works was basically eternal and creativity at best optional.
Imagine a world without your regional publisher. Imagine a world where Kinko’s isn’t sued over a price-fixing scandal for books! Imagine Diamond being worse than they were! Yes, I’ll even go into the famous Paper Scandal of 2015 for anyone who cares about it – which honestly isn’t me, I just like to be complete.
Serdar will cover what could have happened in a world of megacorporations putting out cartoons. I’ll cover why Publishers and Copyhouses got so big and why lawyers got into fistfights in Sweden. Hopefully it also means our books sell on both coasts.
See you there! Look for details soon! And for everyone attending my “Zines in action class” tomorrow, please bring your homework!
This was a fun one. I didn’t want to spell out the world too much, but more explore it from someone’s point of view. What’s media like when big media powerhouses wore down and in some ways destroyed themselves? What’s it like when publishers and distributors gain much more power but are also regional?
Steven Savage