The Titanic and The Internet

We are heading toward the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic.

On the evening of April 14, 1912, the Titanic, steaming toward New York on her maiden voyage, struck an iceberg and within a few hours sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic, taking the lives of more than 1500 people.

It’s great stuff for a movie, or if you are Julian Fellows, for another blockbuster TV series.

But in the Titanic story, there is also both a critical moment of history, and a lesson, for our own business that goes beyond producing successful entertainment.

First, the moment of history.

When the Titanic struck its iceberg, Captain Smith ordered the radioman to begin sending out distress calls.

Radio was fairly uncommon, both on ships, and indeed worldwide in 1912. It was more of a hobbyists toy than a serious instrument for communications.

When the Titanic fired off its CDQ signal (SOS was not yet in use), that signal was picked up by David Sarnoff, a 16-year old Russian immigrant working for the Marconi company in NY.  Sarnoff’s job was to take wireless traffic from their station in the Wannamaker’s Department Store.

This is how David Sarnoff explained the moment to Mary Margaret MacBride of the Saturday Evening Post some ten years after the event:

I came back to New York from the ice fields in 1910, and when John Wanamaker decided to equip his New York and Philadelphia stores with radio stations more powerful than any then installed in the commercial field, I applied for the place of operator, because it would leave my evenings free to take a course in engineering at Pratt Institute. So it happened that I was on duty at the Wanamaker station in New York and got the first message from the Olympic, 1400 miles out at sea, that the Titanic had gone down.

According to Sarnoff’s admittedly self-promoting biography, it was he who transmitted news of the sinking, and later news of the survivor’s names to the rest of the world.  Whether this is all true or not is in some ways immaterial.  Great crowds gathered in the streets upon hearing the news – not in front of The New York Times building, but rather in front of a department store.  Radio had arrived.  The sinking of the Titanic was the first global disaster that happened ‘in real time’.

Sarnoff said that at that moment he had a great insight.  Prior to Titanic, everyone had seen radio as essentially a wireless substitute for telephones.  It allowed one person to talk to another person, albeit without wires.  Sarnoff said that he realized that wireless or radio was something different: it allowed one person to talk to everyone else – broadcasting.  He went on to found RCA and NBC.

That’s the history part. But what about the ‘lesson’?

Prior to Titanic, everyone had indeed seen wireless as telephony, but without the wires.  The new and very potentially very powerful technology of radio was cast into the mold of one-on-one telephone conversations because that was an architecture with which everyone was familiar.

Now comes the Internet.  Another new technology, as radical in its way as was radio, and as much misused and misunderstood.

Broadcasting, as conceived by Sarnoff, became the standard for all mass media.  One person delivering a message to millions – whether it was the radio operator on the sinking Titanic or Julian Fellows on ITV.  I make the message, you all get it.

What was a radical insight in 1912 is now a crippling handicap in 2012.

As almost everyone, save Sarnoff, saw the radio as but another permutation of telephones, now pretty much everyone sees the Internet as but a permutation of television – albeit without the need to broadcast.

But as radio was about much more than communicating one-on-one; the web is about much more than one person sending their signal to millions to be received.
The Internet is, by its own DNA, interactive and participatory.  To use it only to receive content is as crazy as to use radio to call your mother to see how she is. It doesn’t take advantge of what the technology can do, in fact, it fights it.

Perhaps one day companies like NBC or The BBC will realize this, but don’t count on it. Not unless the Queen Mary 2 hits an iceberg and everyone on board starts blogging like crazy.  But what with global warming….. not many icebergs in the North Atlantic these days.