Thursday, May 20, 2010

We The Media

Interesting post (HT to a Roger Ebert tweet) about the changing nature of media: The People Formerly Known as the Audience.  Very nice take on how the listeners/viewers are now creators/editors.  Blogs have replaced the printing press, that podcasts have moved into the terrain occupied by radio ("we have found more uses for it than you did"), video is no longer dominated by a few, and we now network horizontally rather than vertically.

Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.
Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business.
But we’re not on your clock any more. Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, has explained this to his people. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place.”
We graduate from wanting media when we want it, to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves when it meets a need or sounds like fun.
 Read the whole thing.  Very interesting take on the impact of the internet and everything else.  Perhaps the big media can soon sing "I about to lose control and I think I like it."  Or not.

1 comment:

Mrs. Spew said...

The audience isn't in control of anything. The audience gets allowed to do things. Instead of making a home video that you show to your friends, you can put it on the Internet because YouTube, which is owned by a big media corporation, allows you to do so. Instead of gabbing about a t.v. show to your friends, you can do it in a blog, on a website owned by a media/electronics company that allows you to do so or takes your money to do so, and which can shut down your blog anytime it wants. To play on the Internet, you buy expensive toys from media/electronic companies, many of whom also own the pro media. The Internet offers more media and more contact with others, but it's not new media. It just makes the local global, which is a powerful thing, but not one which the audience has any control over.