People like you are becoming content producers at an unprecented pace. How this will unfold is still unpredictable, but it is socially seismic. You probably have made the complete jump to digital cameras if you are reading this. What are the trends?
It has the potential to be a powerful force, moving us from a mass media audience to an online engaged audience interacting about ideas and issues. Think of the power of Gutenberg's press and how everyday JOEs could read the easily disseminated ideas and then discuss these issues at the corner pub.
Hang on to your hat... it is happening faster than you can click that camera button...
Leslie Walker, writing about technology in How The Web Was Won in the Washington Post, noted these things about the internet and the social opportunities it has provided, especially in the last year:
To me, though, the most fascinating story of all was how people took to the Internet to create and share information . In the past year, thousands of new Web communities have popped up offering twists on MySpace and YouTube. Partly these start-ups are the result of something I didn't anticipate -- Internet publishing costs falling through the floor, at a time when Web software grew more powerful. ...Falling costs will turbo-charge personal publishing even more by letting the good ones reach the Web quickly.
Blogging numbers will continue to increase at a phenomenal rate
as new services are launched that make personal publishing more simple
with easier controls for public/private. Pew's recent Internet and
American Life study uncovered that only 8% of U.S. internet users blog (that
is about 12 million people). The MotherPie blog is public but it
easily could have been set up as a password-protected site for
family/friends only. Walker has played with a new blogging service to
be launched this fall - Vox. Vox will take the public/private to a next
step and I'm assuming it will operate something like Flickr's photo
site with a combination of public and private content. The ease of publishing personal content at a low cost will continue the shift of "the social web" and new niched media forms.
Digital tech trends...Kodak continues to lose revenues... the company just announced its seventh quarterly loss in a row. The move from film to digital
has greatly impacted this company which in 2005 was dropped from the
Dow Jones Industrial index, showing how fast this shift is happening.
With the advent of the 5 megapixel camera, my life-long photography
hobby shifted completely to digital in 2005. The black and white Tri-X
film sits untouched in my drawer with my heavy Minolta. I now use a
digital SLR 8 pixel camera with a great lense, but my little
pocket-size 5 megapixel camera can produce more easily manipulated
photos that can upload simply to Flickr or Shutterfly (for free sharing and easy printing) or MotherPie (content production).
Regular people producing content in a socially-usable way is the biggest seismic shift. Digital film production and easy editing tools are behind the meteoric rise of YouTube. Evidence of this: YouTube takes over MySpace. Powerful global media mogul Robert Murdoch's recent residence move to the U.S. positions his company, News Corporation (MySpace -bought last year for $580 million, Fox News - now the top-watched cable news program), to take advantage of the new media trends. Murdoch is ready to be at the front end of transforming the free-media new platform of MySpace into a mega-marketing machine. He doesn't want to be left behind in this most disruptive media move hitting the youth culture since MTV, according to a recent Wired article.
The shift to regular people becoming content producers and engaging in sharing content rather than receiving content passively (allowing media owners to be enriched through mass media advertising) will be -- could be -- might be -- a powerful and extremely societal-changing force.
I just read about how the Crimean War was a political fiasco, and was the first war covered by the Press. Could that be a coincidence??? Hmmm... I want to do a little investigating.
Posted by: Laundry Woman | August 04, 2006 at 09:58 AM
Did you see the recent article about Stephen Colbert's manipulation of Wikipedia? It's very interesting and just shows the shift in "mainstream" media.
Posted by: Chris | August 04, 2006 at 01:12 PM