Push and pull




There was a very interesting article in the Observer today from John Naughton, who is apparently an Internet Guru. He was talking about broadcasting and the way in which it is changing.

You have the general picture of a boadcasting medium which might have attracted 20 million ten years ago but will now only attract 5 million because our interests are now more focused and there are more pushing channels available to us.

What I couldn’t understand was the push/pull arguments he developed. i have heard these before. Why is broadcast TV only a push technology. We choose to watch it. We choose to change channels. We choose to switch off. We can choose to pull it.

He says ” The web is opposite to this. It’s a pull medium. Nothing comes to you unless you choose it and click on it to pull it down to your computer. Your in charge” How on earth is this different from the push model?

It was a classic. I was trying to explain it to my youngest daughter and you suddenly realise the stupidity of your statements. Everything is a ‘pull’ technology. Even with a podcast you pull it down even though it is pushed towards you.Is this an emporer’s new clothes scenario? Shouldn’t we abandon this simplistic model and accept the fact that it is even simpler. We are in an era when their are a myriad of pushes that we can choose from. We can also also join the pushers with our web based activities including our blogs. Everybody can become a pusher and likewise all can be pullers.

Naughton was right when he said that “the asymmetry of the old push-media world is being overturned” It has omly because we can all be pushers not just pullers.

Published in: on March 5, 2006 at 7:37 pm Comments (3)
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)

3 Comments

  1. on March 6, 2006 at 2:33 am James Farmer Said:

    Agreed that the fact that we can all be pushers now is a big deal, but not sure that everything is ‘pull’.

    Isn’t pulling about ‘how’ and ‘when’?

    Or maybe not… hmmmm….

  2. on March 6, 2006 at 5:46 pm Mike Farmer Said:

    I’ve been thinking and talking about this with colleagues and I’m tempted to revise my thinking. Obviously I should have gone to Google before opening my mouth. Webopedia says:
    ” To request data from another program or computer. The opposite of pull is push, where data is sent without a request being made. The terms push and pull are used frequently to describe data sent over the Internet. The World Wide Web is based on pull technologies, where a page isn’t delivered until a browser requests it. Increasingly, however, Information services are harnessing the Internet to broadcast information using push technologies.”

    I rather like the paper by J Hagel and J Seely Brown who describe push models as treating people as passive consumers….tv schedules, newspapers etc while pull models treat people as creative indviduals who can choose and develop their own programmes of ‘capability building’. I think I can go for that…ie linking the definition to the user rather than the creator. The paper is at http://www.johnhagel.com/paper_pushpull.pdf.

  3. on May 29, 2006 at 6:08 am attmore Said:

    I love this site. Good work…