The People's Media

Jeff Jarvis was interviewed by Ernest Miller on Corante last week, about the future of media. It's interesting as he's clearly come from "old" media, but has a strong foothold in the "new" one of blogdom.

If I had to summarise the interview, I'd do it thusly; the future is bright, the future is blogging.

Didn't you realise that reading this was part of a revolution?

Over the the interview. Here's some of the highlights, but it's worth reading the whole thing. He's also very excited about Podcasting - which is only about a month old, but is attracting a lot of attention. Read here for a "how to" guide.

The means of media are now in the hands of the people.

The people we used to call consumers, readers, or viewers (let's call them citizens now) will take more and more control of what we used to call media (I don't know what new name to give it, but now it's as much about conversation as it is about consumption). The elements of this upheaval:

* Control: I say the most revolutionary invention in media was not the Gutenberg press but the remote control. It and the cable box, the VCR, and the TiVo enabled us to control consumption of media -- and we took advantage of that. Bad TV died; good TV rose in the ratings; HBO was born; TV exploded; TV improved -- thanks to the good taste and newfound control of the American public.

* Creation: Now come tools that let us create media: blogging software (which is merely history's cheapest easiest publishing tool connected to history's best distribution network) and all those neat things that come with Macs today. They allow us to make text, photo, audio, and video media. And what we make has value. Jonathan Miller, head of AOL, told me that 60-70 percent of the time spent on his service is spent with content created by his audience. That's where the money is.

* Marketing: At the same time -- thanks mostly to Google and blogs turning links into assets with tangible value -- we the people have the ability to market content; we do every time we link to it. Jon Stewart's blockbuster appearance on Crossfire got a few hundred thousand viewers on CNN but ten times that online thanks to the links of Fark and bloggers.

* Distribution: And the means of distribution are getting cheaper and faster: BitTorrent shares the cost of distribution across the network; RSS automates it; broadband will soon be part of the public infrastructure like roads or even a fundamental right like voting. So look again at Stewart on Crossfire: That segment didn't need carriage on a cable network with big clearance to be seen by millions; it got there via BitTorrent and iFilm.

So now anyone can control, create, market, distribute, find, and interact with anything they want. The barrier to entry to media is demolished. Media, always a one-way pipe, now becomes an open pool. And, most important, the centralization of media -- the marketplace, the network, the monopoly -- is replaced by a decentralized universe. This changes everything. It changes the relationships. It changes the economics. It changes the power.

Nice to know others think the same :-)

Comments

[Charlie]

I like what I see here. I have a company that involves new media. It is amazing on 2 fronts. Few people in the world know what a blog is. The MSM press are badmouthing blogging for one reason. They're scared.