Friends o Blogcritics Dan Gillmor and Doc Searls arrive at similar views of the transformation of consumers into producers made possible by technology. Gillmor:

During Super Bowl week later this month, a political advertisement will air on some TV stations. That's no big surprise, given that the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary are about to kick off voting in the 2004 presidential nominating race.

But this particular commercial wasn't made by a high-powered ad agency for a well-funded candidate. The ad, to be selected from 15 finalists in the "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest sponsored by MoveOn.org, was created by an individual or a small team of regular people.

The competition finalists are citizen-activists, and their work is just one more public demonstration of a still underappreciated evolution. Personal technology is undermining the broadcast culture of the late 20th century. It's putting tools that were once the preserve of Big Media into the hands of the many.

The broadcast culture assumes that most of us are "consumers" of mass media. We are merely receptacles for what Hollywood, the music industry and even our local daily newspaper decide we should view, hear or read.

The post-broadcast culture is a democratization of media, and it comes at things from the opposite stance. It says that anyone also can be a creator, not just a consumer. There's a world of difference.

....Print has moved the furthest. Not only can people create Web sites with relatively little effort compared with what it used to take, we now have tools that make it almost as easy to write on the Web as read from it. Weblogs, in particular, show what can happen when the readers become writers — spurring on a vast global conversation.

Music has made enormous strides, but digital music products have not been easy to use for the most part. That's why I'm so intrigued by GarageBand, a piece of software Apple Computer will start selling this week.

If GarageBand is as excellent as it looked when it was announced last week, it will bring music-making to a new crew of people, and to a new level of user-friendliness.

Video, too, is getting easier to produce, and the equipment you need to make good-quality videos is getting downright affordable.

....Smarter folks will understand the enormous opportunity it represents. They can start listening, really listening, to what people are saying. And they can dip into the vast pool of creative talent that exists outside the usual channels.

If I were running a political campaign of any size, I would be asking my candidate's supporters to send in their best ideas and home-brew advertisements. Campaigns already are starting to converse with and listen better to their supporters, via Weblogs and other media.

The first clue came when Steve Jobs dropped a line about how much he and Apple "love music". Other clues came when he talked about the iTunes music store, which clearly is challenging the established way of doing things in the music industry. Still more clues came when he showed off enhancements to iDVD, which makes producing DVDs exceptionally easy. But the picture finally became clear when he spent an almost unbearably long time showing off a new application called GarageBand, "an anytime, anywhere recording studio packed with hundreds of instruments and a recording engineer or two for good measure". For the first time I saw that this isn't simply a technical or marketing hack--it's an economic one.
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