The Black Death & The Video Revolution – what does it mean for you?

Don’t move the camera…

In 1347, The Black Death, as it was called then, or the bubonic plague, swept across Europe with a vengence.

Within a few months, more than one third of the population was dead.  In some towns and villages the mortality rates were even higher.

For Medieval Europeans, such a fast moving and utterly devastating event could only be seen as a mark of God’s displeasure or the beginning of the End of Days.

Having entire communities wiped out in a fortnight was the immediate event, but the economic consequences of the Black Death were far more far-reaching and to a great extent, far more interesting.

With thousands dying and many more simply fleeing the land and their villages in fear, there was no one left to till the soil or service the wealthy.  Once, there had been a surplus of labor and the serfs were lucky to be able to feed their families on the scraps left behind.  Now, suddenly, labor was at a premium. As well, the death of so many so rapidly had concentrated what little wealth there was in fewer hands.

By 1349 the economic situation was catastrophic, at least from the point of view of the ruing classes.

The poor suddenly discovered that they had the power to change their situation and demand better wages and better living conditions.

During the summer of 1349, the ruling class struck back.  They made it illegal for employers to pay more for labor than they had paid in 1346, the year before the Plague.  Harsh penalties were inflicted on those peasants who refused to work.  The pressure escalated in the 1350s and 1360s.  But by 1381, the ruling class could no longer contain the realities of the new world. A new generation of serfs, with no memory of pre-Plague conditions would no longer put up with the ‘old ways’.  The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 began a quantum shift in the relationship between workers and land owners that continues to this day.

OK. All very interesting, but what does this have to do with video?

Today’s social and economic revolution is not, thankfully, being driven by mass deaths and disease, but rather by technology, which can have equally powerful ‘destructive’ capabilities – but leave its victims standing.

Yesterday, on the forum on  b-roll.net, a web site for professional cameramen mostly in the news business, a 20-year veteran cameraman wrote a long and moving posting about how frustrated he was that he simply could not find a job, even at $30,000 a year, after a long and successful career as a news cameraman.

While it is not The Black Plague, for people who used to earn their livings and have built their lives around a technology that simply does not exist any more, the consquences are equally dislocative.

They are watching as the world they understood to be safe and secure is simply wiped out before their eyes.  The lot of many who worked in newspapers or magazines is no different.

The advent of small, efficent technologies for creating content and distributing it at almost no cost are remaking the basic ecnomics of many industries in a way that is, in fact, little different from what The Black Death did to Feudal economies 650 years ago – turned them upside down.

For the established landed gentry, the reshuffling of the economic deck wrought by The Black Death was the worst possible consequence they could imagine. 1,000 years of cheap labor and a way of life came to a fairly rapid end.  They tried in vain to stem the flow of reality, but with no success, and in the end were forced to set off on a path that, in fact, led to a far richer society for all (though it is unlikely that any could see it that way in the 14th Century).

Today, the ‘landed gentry’ have been replaced by massive media corporations, but their plight is no different. A way of life and a way of doing business that they assumed as carved in stone and would go on ad infinitum is rapidly drawing to a close before their eyes.  The ‘bonded serfs of media’, call them empoyees, have now found themselves with the hitherto inaccessable tools necessary to create content for their masters – in their own hands, to do with as they please.

The old ways are gone forever, and the poor cameraman/employee at b-roll who can no longer find a job finds himself squeezed out by the irresistable headlong rush of technology.  Interestingly, he and the owners of major media companies find themselves in common cause – ‘what is happening?’

But, as with The Black Death, massive dislocations also bring with them massive new opportunities as the deck of life gets reshuffled.

I wrote to the cameraman at b-roll and told him to stop looking for jobs at local TV news stations.  This is a quick road to a dead end.

Instead, I told him, the advent of iPads, iPhones and video on line means that every major publication – and every major corporation, is going to migrate (have to migrate) to the Interent and to mobile functionality. And as all of those services are viewed on screens, the vast majority of that content is going to be, sooner or later, in video.

This is a skill that he already has in abundance – and one that local TV stations may no longer be willing to pay for, but many others will. What he has to do is to start looking beyond his 20 year old established habit of thinking of ‘where the jobs are’.  This is a new world that has be as self created – and may be as alien – as it was for surviving surfs to suddenly realize the economic opportunities that lay before them.

Today, no one in their right mind would want to go back to the economic conditions of 1346, even if it did carry a degree of ‘security’ (born a serf, die a serf – cradle to grave, no worries).  100 years from now, people will look back on the era of media ’employment’, and the ‘security’ that working for a newspaper or a TV station brought with the same revulsion.

*photo by Arlo Bryan Guthrie. Modeled by Re’chard Atwater