From The Economist – “Among the Audience” – this article focuses on how the era of mass media is giving way to an era of personal and participatory media. Here are some juicy tidbits:
1. A comparison to Gutenberg’s movable type and the Trott’s Movable Type blogging application – the article claims they make dandy bookends for the era of mass media (cool thought).
2. 57% of teenagers create content for the internet
3. Perople no longer passively consume media, but now actively participate in them, which usually means creating content
4. Doesn’t mean “people write their own newspaper” – it can be as simple as rating a local restaurant or a movie they watched
5. Money isn’t the reason to create content – instead, there are two ends to the spectrum – one end is “people creating stuff to build their own reputations” (hmm – fits in pretty well with the recent discussion about self-promotion), and the other end are “one-man superbrands” (the article lists Steven Speilberg as an example – I’d list real bloggers, like Jeremy Zawodny (sp?) )
6. “one-to-many “lectures” (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into “conversations” among “the people formerly known as the audience”. This changes the tone of public discussions”
7. “What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration technologies that are now being developed” (as opposed to large media giants “pushing” selected media at us.
After this article, there are other articles about specific things, like blogging… possibly more later!
