There’s a reason I left newspaper journalism to become a blogger.
In 2006 you could see the writing on the wall. If you couldn’t see that newspapers needed to evolve if they didn’t want to go extinct, you were living in an impermeable bubble somewhere deep below the earth’s crust. Bloggers were getting press passes. Bloggers were gaining influence. Journalists got defensive. When I met author John Battelle at a conference that year, he told me he liked blogs because you could make typos. He said, “Blogs are honest.”
It was weird to be introduced to blogging in this way. It was weird that you could write “Some guy said xxx” as part of a paragraph online and hit “publish.” And presto, it’s “out there.” Even if they’re not fact-checked or attributed, the lines of writing on the Internet are still very much real.
This is all very difficult to talk about since the shakedown with the Seattle P-I getting downsized. But the idea that anybody anywhere can say something and be heard is the powerful underlining message in this TED talk about how the Internet changed media. No longer one-way communication, not even two-ways, the conversation we are having today is on the order of many-to-many. (Sometimes too much gets to your screen, IMHO).
See what writer/NYU professor Clay Shirky says about how the Internet changed media:
Clay Shirky here presents a very relevant, strong case for change in how we think of media (and by extension, marketing, advertising and branding). I feel excited about the possibility, and almost angry that so many people (including ourselves, from time to time) just simply don’t get it. Thanks for sharing.
Back in grad school in 1990, we talked about how desktop publishing wsa changing human communication by making publishing more affordable and accessible to the masses. Certainly freedom of the press belonged to those who had a press.
We had no idea that the revolution had only just begun and would evolve at a more rapid pace than anything in man’s history.
The internet - webpages created by whoever whanted to communicate something to the world instantly. Now, bolgs. OIt does boggle the mind.
Will we be astounded at our progress in ten years?
The changes in communication, media, tech - from the Mac to the ipod to the iphone to WHAT? - are demanding changes not just in the ad and marketing world, but the fabric of our society. Yes, our thought-processes are changing and evolving and exploding. I’m stoked! Thanks for the post!!!!
@Lakeland Internet Marketing,
Thanks for the comments here. I remember desktop publishing! DTP. I also remember Ventura Publishing, the first program I used for a school report. It was about robots, and I scanned and pasted in pictures from the Encyclopedia Brittanica to illustrate my points.
Not unlike these blog posts, really.