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The Broadcast Mentality
Why Commercial Websites Still Imitate Television
4/16/1999

by Glenn Kurtz

As web designers, we are participating in a profound historical transition, from a society mediated by mass production and mass communication, to one mediated by distributed computer networks. Just as machine production and telecommunications revolutionized pre-industrial society, redefining on a mass scale how people worked, consumed, and pursued happiness, so digital technology will revolutionize the ideas, attitudes, and institutions of the industrial era, redefining our activities on the scale of the user.

In this moment of transition, however, the greatest obstacle to success is often what was most successful before. Most businesses, rather than changing how they think about their activities to reflect the emerging digital reality, press the new technology into the service of old ideas. Even with an extensive and expensive web presence, most businesses have not considered how the computer can transform the conventional relation between producers and consumers that has characterized commerce for the last 100 years.

What stands in the way of real innovation is not the complexity of digital technology, but the inability to break commercial habits established during the broadcast era. These habits, which I call the broadcast mentality, still influence the corporate approach to web design, often resulting in an unconscious imitation of television. But computer networks differ fundamentally from broadcast networks, and effective design in the new medium must take advantage of this difference. The decisive question for web producers is this: Do you see your audience as receivers of your information, or as producers of their own? The answer to this question separates network-savvy design from the broadcast mentality.

Television and the Broadcast Mentality

The relations between producer and consumer established during the era of mass production and mass communication are symbolized most clearly by television. Here, a producer broadcasts a product to a mass audience, whose role is solely to receive it. The technology of television enforces these roles by dividing the capacity to broadcast and to receive among different devices. The home TV set is a reception device, and no matter how many channels are available, or how high the definition of the picture, the only role a TV set allows its users is that of receiver.

The broadcast relation between producers and consumers encompasses not only broadcast media, but also most mass produced consumer products. A consumer searching for a dishwasher, a music CD, or for lingerie has just as little opportunity to influence the nature of the available products as a television viewer has to influence the available programs. In the broadcast era, both consumer and viewer are understood as receivers of products aimed at a mass audience. Although there are mass feedback mechanisms - the Nielsen ratings, for example, or sales figures and customer surveys - these merely register the responses of receivers. They are not a means by which consumers can influence products. Just like a television program, the only choice a mass produced product offers the consumer is to accept or reject it. This relation is symbolized by broadcast technology, but it is embodied in every form of commercial exchange developed during the broadcast era.

Of course, the unequal relation between producer and consumer is not arbitrary. On the contrary, the broadcast relation established and enforced by mass production and mass communication is often the most economically efficient compromise between the needs of the producer and the needs of the consumer that this technology allows. At the turn of the 20th century, these compromises were utterly revolutionary in scope and significance. Thanks to them, we live in a society of plenty, enjoying a cornucopia of goods unparalleled in history.

But the commercial compromises made possible by the technology of mass production and mass communication are not eternal. Indeed, by altering the dynamics between producers and consumers, digital technology makes these compromises obsolete. It is at this moment, however, that we encounter the broadcast mentality. While digital technology erodes the foundation for the commercial compromises of the broadcast era, they persist as unexamined habits influencing how we design and implement online commercial transactions. Instead of discovering the new forms of commercial relation digital technology makes possible, businesses employ the new tools to reproduce familiar patterns. The broadcast mentality thus describes the failure to make the conceptual leap from the era of mass production to the digital era.

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