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In his 31-year academic career, Jeffrey Cole has always worked off campus. Since 2004, he’s served as director of USC’s Center for the Digital Future, where he spends more time consulting with corporations than in the classroom. The center is on the 39th floor of a downtown office tower. Cole’s research-backed predictions about behavior on the Internet earn him invitations to worldwide events, ranging from the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival to Google’s private annual brainstorming session. Cole also spends time briefing the center’s five corporate sponsors: Microsoft Corp., WWP Group, Sony Corp., AT & T; Inc. and Telstra Ltd. The center also consults on Web policy with 20 nations and the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Communications Commission. Cole was working at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management in the mid-1990s when he directed the Network Television Violence Monitoring Project, which issued annual reports to Congress, the public and the TV industry. The project was highly controversial because of its high-profile examination of violence in the media and its impact on society.



Question: Did you watch a lot of TV when you were a boy?

Answer: I loved TV as a child, but I didn’t watch much kid’s stuff. I loved sitcoms and dramas, specifically “Hawaii Five-O,” “Beverly Hillbillies,” and later “M*A*S*H*” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”


Q: Did you ever consider becoming a TV producer?

A: I had some experience in the 1980s in television production for the studios but not distinguished. I love working for the university, love the affiliation.


Q: How did you become a “violence monitor” for the TV industry?

A: In 1993, U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) got an anti-trust waiver so the TV networks could sit down for the first time and deal with television content issues. Simon and the networks asked me to run the program, which was called the Network Television Violence Monitoring Project. I spent five years meeting regularly with the heads of the networks, general counsels and heads of programming.


Q: How did these people see you?

A: They looked at me skeptically. The networks made a political deal with Sen. Simon: If they allowed an outsider to come in, Simon would forestall V-chips or other governmental regulation. The networks agreed reluctantly.


Q: Was it an adversarial process?

A: Well, they believed I was as fair as they were going to get not that they thought I was totally fair. In time they came to see value in having an outsider look at their work, as evidenced by the fact that after the deal ended, the networks renewed it for another year.


Q: Did you ever pressure them to change shows? Did they pressure you to change your research?

A: No, my power was all soft power I could consult, not order. Even though they funded it, they never tried to compromise the conclusions. They were honorable in that.


Q: How did the project work?

A: We taped every primetime show on every network. Then we hired communication students to view the shows and fill out a scene-by-scene report. We would review these reports, and at the end of the season, issue conclusions about which shows had frequent problems with violent content, as well as shows that handled violence well.


Q: What was the purpose of the study?

A: To document violence on television, especially for parents. A lot of groups were complaining and Congress felt the pressure. The project was an attempt to see if the television industry could regulate itself.


Q: What was the outcome?

A: After the V-chip and the Parental TV Guidelines system came into effect in 1997, the TV industry felt it had been as responsive as could reasonably be expected. I didn’t want to spend my lifetime in television, so it was time to move on.


Q: How did you jump to the Internet?

A: I was always taught that we blew it with television. Since we knew TV was going to be successful from the first signal that was broadcast, we should have tracked people before they had television, then gone back to them year after year to see how their lives changed. I became convinced in the late ’90s that the impact of digital would dwarf television. So I started the Center for the Digital Future.


Q: You established a control group for the Internet?

A: Yes. We have gone back to the same people eight years in a row to see how their habits have changed.


Q: How did you survive the dot-com bust?

A: During the boom, a lot of M.B.A. students at the Anderson School dropped out to join Internet startups. After the meltdown, B2B stood for “back to banking” and B2C meant “back to consulting.”


Q: In making predictions, do you ever guess wrong?

A: One of the poorest predictions I made was about e-commerce in 2000. People were terrified of putting their credit card or privacy at risk. I never thought e-commerce could grow until those fears were dealt with. But as we’ve seen, people, despite those fears, sucked in their breath and bought.


Q: In your research, what have been the surprises?

A: It’s surprising how quickly people changed from negative to positive. For example, one of the big reasons people didn’t want to buy online in 2001 was the lack of human interaction. Within 18 months, that became one of the biggest assets. They found they really didn’t want to deal with humans unless they had a problem.


Q: How about the stereotypes of the Web?

A: We’re working on a report now that shows, in the face of common wisdom, that people in their 60s and 70s are behaving the same way teenagers do online. They use social networks more than teens. They use the Internet for information more than teens.


Q: What about business?

A: We frequently hear employers complain about the amount of personal time people spend in the office surfing the Internet and sending e-mail. That surprises us because most employers should understand that for every hour their employees are at the office with personal matters, they spend three or more hours at home doing work related to their job. The line between work and home has completely blurred, and not to the advantage of the employee. It’s to the advantage of the employer.


Q: So as a consultant, what do you tell executives about dealing with the Internet?

A: I think they should just keep quiet and take advantage of all this. We hear comments from people in the workplace saying, “I can do in 30 hours what I used to do in 40 hours.” But nobody is working 30 hours and calling it a week. Workers are taking on more work than ever before.


Q: Why do you enjoy studying all this?

A: I’ve always been interested in mass media because of its power. As an old Betamax and Apple II user, I wanted to know why better technology does not always win. It’s fascinating to see how fears and desires play out in technology.


Q: So why doesn’t the best tech win?

A: Largely business and marketing reasons: Sony had better Betamax technology, but VHS did a better job of lining up movie studios to release their films. Sony was both angry and perplexed on why it lost the Betamax war. That lead directly to buying Columbia Pictures and a music company. That decision finally became vindicated in January this year with HD DVDs versus Blu-ray discs. Sony and Blu-ray won that war largely because of the marketing muscle of Columbia.


Q: How valuable will this be for Sony?

A: Unfortunately, although Sony won that war, it may be a hollow victory. Our work suggests people won’t own DVDs much longer. If you’re looking at a 160 gigabyte iPod, people have no need for CDs anymore.


Q: What was the turning point of your career?

A: Two days away from starting law school, deciding I didn’t want to be a lawyer. This was 1975. I was looking to go to Berkeley and I also got accepted at Yale. I just woke up in the middle of the night and thought about what lawyers do, and what I wanted to do. So I didn’t go.


Q: So how did you find your career?

A: I needed job. I had a friend who was chairman of the communications department at UCLA. He had a hunch I would be a good teacher. He hired me for a year and I fell in love with teaching.


Q: What was the hardest experience of your career?

A: Leaving UCLA after 25 years. I taught more than 40,000 students there. It was like leaving my family to find a new one. But my new family turned out pretty wonderful.


Q: Who are your heroes?

A: My dissertation was on Edward R. Murrow. I’m fascinated with how he single-handedly created the craft of broadcast journalism. As a scholar, I’ve always been a huge fan of David Halberstam.


Q: How about your favorite characters?

A: “Citizen Kane.” Lines from “Citizen Kane” have guided my life. Lines like: “It’s not hard to make a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” What I’ve tried to do in my life is make some money while researching things I care about. Also, I love Fellini’s “Eight and a Half” about self-reflection. Probably the most perfect movie ever made was “The Godfather.”


Q: If you couldn’t be an academic, what would you do with your life?

A: I’d make television shows.


Q: At a time when the medium is sinking?

A: With the Internet, most media will end up as smaller businesses theatrical film, music, radio, newspapers. But television will have explosive growth. It will escape from the home. People will watch it at the airport, on the plane and on bigger screens at home. Television will be hugely important.


Q: But won’t citizen journalists and video bloggers erode the TV business model?

A: No, because on the Internet brand means more than ever. We see teenagers who have never read the New York Times going to NYTimes.com because it’s shorthand for quality and reliability. Even though YouTube gets all this attention with viral videos, most people go on YouTube to see Jon Stewart or “Saturday Night Live.” The barriers to creating content have dropped to almost zero, but most of us aren’t very talented. So professionally produced content with a script rises higher than ever before.


Jeffrey Cole

Title: Director

Organization: Center for the Digital Future, USC Annenberg School of Communications

Born: 1953; Pittsburgh

Education: B.A. and M.A. in history; Ph.D. in communications, all from UCLA

Career Turning Point: Opting out of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law two days before the start of classes

Most Influential People: Geoffrey Cowan, dean of USC Annenberg; teacher Andrea Rich, who went on to become vice chancellor of UCLA and director of Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Manuel Castells, USC professor and “the best Internet researcher in the world”

Personal: Married, no children; splits time between residences in L.A. and New York.

Hobbies: Traveling to Europe and Asia; reading biographies and history; listening to Tom Clancy books on CD

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