The Changes in Our Media Landscape by Roger Horrocks

​Roger Horrocks is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Auckland. He has been a biographer, film-maker and poet and has helped to establish many media and arts organizations.

We are living through major historical changes. I want to focus on one aspect – how the media have changed. That is less important than the tragic human cost of the pandemic, but it is something that influences my working life. The pandemic has thrown us more deeply into the internet age. Celluloid film had already been eclipsed, and other media were under serious financial pressure, including printed newspapers, magazines and books, broadcast television and radio, etc. The lockdown condensed years of change into a few months. I know there have been exceptions – some renewed interest in printed books and broadcast news – but all analogue forms of culture have been battered by the combination of the lockdown and the accompanying recession. Writers have seen publishers go out of business. Music and theatre people have lost venues for live performance. At present, every arts organization and every individual artist I know has financial worries, more so than usual. There will need to be a major effort to rebuild (or rethink) much of our culture. That will involve the perennial struggle of our small, marginal country to deal with offshore owners and large corporations – the corporations in control of the digital world, which have been strengthened by the lockdown.
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Of course, the internet has many wonderful capabilities, and our society will innovate and adapt to this new age. But we need to remember that the technology also has problematic aspects, described by Shoshana Zuboff in her book Surveillance Capitalism and by documentaries such as The Social Dilemma. One of the strengths of the internet is its global scope, but we need to avoid being smothered by the flood of material from sources which seek to manipulate or profit from us. I grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s and remember the banal atmosphere of a New Zealand that was still colonial and other-directed.

I hope that our country’s remarkable experience in escaping the worst of the pandemic can help strengthen our desire to remain a unique, independent, diverse society. COVID-19 has emphasised our sense of community and reminded us we can do things differently from other countries. Not that we can’t also be citizens of the world, which will be crucial in dealing with the on-going crisis of climate change.

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