Mark Deuze Author of Media Work, Guest Lecturer

Mark Deuze a professor at Indiana University and author of the book Media Work spent most of the day Tuesday on campus here at the UB. I attended a guest lecture that Deuze spoke at for Trebor Scholz’s class about the social web. During his guest lecture Deuze talked about the harsh realities of working in the media industry focusing on the lack of long term jobs, the instability of the industry, and the fact that most media professionals over the age of 35 were looking to get out.

Here are some of my favorite notes I took down during his lecture:

- Networking is more important than anything else in media, because of the setup of temporary nature of the jobs your relationships are extremely important.

-A quote from his presentation that he obtained during an interview about the rise of user generated content and the view media corporations take on it,  “User-created content can double inventory volume at a production cost of one to three percent the cost of staff produced newspaper content. “

- On the outlook of one video production company,”… we could make a great game or make a mod kit.” Instead of dumping more money into development they can use the community to create a better product.

And two interesting stats:

-American movies produced outside the US surpassed movies produced in the US in 2003.

-Largest job drop in traditional media ever last year, 88.4% of people lost jobs.  (that is using measurable traditional media numbers) This was the highest percentage drop out of any industry in the United States.

My classmate Kevin Lim recorded some of our discussion from our graduate reading group with Mark Deuze which is very eye opening and interesting for anyone that works in or wants to work in the media industry. You can check it out at his website and the video at theory.isthereason.com.