In terms of content production the Internet and advances in processing technologies (not just the chip but also the algorithm) the current media environment now consists of around thirty innovations including podcasts, vidcasts, blogs, RSS feeds, aggregation of content, automation of content production, online classifieds, new forms of search and search result visualisation, personal TV stations, social bookmarking, social networks, Wikis, mobile content (two minute movies), SMS of course, mixed media productions, virtual worlds (Second Life), start pages.
The list is so long that it begs a little understanding. What does it mean? The reality is only a few things are happening though they are happening in many ways.
1. The fact is everybody (within sufficient media literacy) can create a content object that can be freely distributed to everybody. This is the flat earth syndrome. There are going to be no media hierarchies, we think.
2. Many of the people who create media objects like blogs, vidcasts etc, have them aggregated by others (so there is a new hierarchy!). Aggregation simply means a site that compiles extracts from other sites/media objects and presents that aggregation as a new media object.
3. The institutions which have mediated knowledge and credibility over the past 150 years are in disrepair and consequently what we know and our credulity are suffering. It’s the counterpart to mass creativity.
This is not like a revolution but in its essentials it signals dramatic change.
The “media” for over 150 years have acted as a mediating power between corporations, politicians, authorities and the population at large. They are the cornerstone of the societies we have known and lived in. Nothing much could have functioned as it did, without them.
Newspapers and latterly radio and then TV have explained the daily functioning of our societies to us. Books were still written of course, but their authors came to our radio sets, newspapers and TVs to explain their ideas. The world of knowledge diffusion has effectively been underwritten by brand managers. That’s the down and dirty of how we have organised society.
News organisations make compromises to stay in business, keeping one eye on the ad master, the other on the audience. But they have also executed their roles successfully and maintained themselves in this mediating position, reporting news on corporations, politicians and authorities, while earning ad revenue, staying out of gaol, and maintaining large audiences.
We are taking that cornerstone away. The result might simply be that corporations, politicians and authorities have to go out seeking more mediating points to maintain their presence and credibility.
The result might also be, though, a profound loss of certainty, a loss of societal identity, the breakdown of what limited commonality societies enjoyed.
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