Supply and demand

Ok so this blog is definitely a learning process. I think maybe chosing a subject which is more an essay title than really-fun-I-want-to-write-every-day-even-after-hours-of-lectures may threaten to stunt its progress. So I'm going to relax a little and just see where it takes me.


The next step in my investigation into the consumption and production of English langauge media abroad is, well, me. I reckon the best way to start to look at this issue is to think when and where and why I have used the British media.

More and more Britons have been travelling if not moving abroad in recent years. That is of course until the pound started to feel an awful lot heavier, and generally onerous, in our wallets. According to the BBC, one in ten British citizens lived abroad in 2006. Although the figures surrounding this question seem a bit hazy, the BBC reported that around 6 million British-born people lived overseas or split their time between the two. I would suggest that many of these people contribute to the high overseas consumption of online British media .

When I lived in Egypt, a visit to the internet cafe was a long-awaited high point in my week. This wasn't purely due to the joy of receiving presents from Ahmad the lovely but slightly wonky-eyed attendant (although the presents would've been a lot better if they weren't website addresses), nor was it just the chance to savour a burst of air conditioning in the swelting Egyptian summer. Using the web when I lived abroad was a chance to 'touch base' and British media played a big part in that. It was a chance to hide away from the dust, the baksheesh and the Cairo taxis (all of which I loved of course but were tiring at times) and indulge in the clean, well-ordered BBC website. There I could keep in touch with everything going on at home. There I didn't feel so far away.

I think lots of other people must feel the same, whether they are enjoying retirement on a Spanish Costa, working in the sky-scrapers of Dubai or wandering across Mongolia with a backpack. And since other forms of media, newspapers for instance, are generally hard to get, it is online media which provides the information and the escapism. This point is well-illustrated I think by another example from Egypt. Whilst baking myself on the beach in Dahab on the Red Sea (pretending to study at the same time of course) a vendor walked past offering me a newspaper, The Times I think. How much? Nine pounds he said, that means 90p in Sterling I thought. But no, how wrong I was. He wanted nine British pounds for a copy of a newpaper I would normally buy for one. Just to put that into context, a taxi driver once told me he earnt 50 Egyptian pounds a day which equates to about 5 British pounds. That taxi driver would have to work for two days and let his family go hungry in order to buy a copy of that newspaper.

But people on the beach must've bought it or the vendor wouldn't have been selling it at that price. And good for him. People want the media and they are obviously willing to pay for it. But on the net its free and easy. That's good for them but not so good for people like myself who would like to make a living by providing the information. I think the British media can take hope from this example. There is definitely still demand, and increasingly so from abroad but we need to figure out a happy medium between the clumsy and expensive hard publications (although £9 is unusual for a newspaper I admit) and the free for all which is the internet at the moment.