Babelmachine

Digital Strangelove: All media is social, you are what you share

Nov 4, 2009 14:41

I stumbled upon this brilliant presentation by David Gillespie, thanks to Misty Belardo's tweet, and I just wanted to share it with you and give my own views about it.

Be warned, though, it has 263 slides, but it's worth going through the whole presentation and digesting all this food for thought.

As someone who was a tech journalist for over a decade and who was among the pioneers who spun off the country's leading news site from the number one Philippine broadsheet, I've seen a lot of changes over the years and advocated many of them. Among the things that Gillespie's presentation tackles is the ongoing evolution from traditional media to social media.

Ironically, as the slides point out, all media is inherently supposed to be social. Traditional media, however, was born in an environment where information was scarce, and where only a privileged few could become publishers. These days, however, content is already a commodity. It is just as easy to create content as it is to consume it. We are not just passive consumers, but content creators in our own right. Instead of information scarcity, we have information overload. And to survive in this new age, traditional media has to rethink some of its most cherished illusions.

One of these illusions is that the old business models will still work, and that it's just a matter of using new tools to churn out the same old content and facilitate the same old processes. At the risk of sounding reductive, traditional media has been based on the idea of control: They decide what's newsworthy, they decide what gets published, they decide what the readers can say.

Which is why even when deploying social media tools such as Twitter, unfortunately, some news organizations seem to see it only as a means to publish their content, rather than as an opportunity to engage their readers and become part of a community. In other words, they're still trying to control the conversation. They're still trying to perpetuate the outmoded notion of the passive reader.

The irony is that some publications act as if we were still in a world where traditional media is the only one that can create content. But the Internet has empowered everyone with the tools for content creation, and some amateurs are actually more creative and more knowledgeable than some professional journalists.

Moreover, many of them are more passionate, and as I've always said, passion is what I look for in people, especially those who are applying for jobs. Skills can be taught, but passion is something a person has to be born with or instill in himself or herself in order to succeed.

Which is why I was always in disagreement before with those in the newsroom who saw only, say, blogging as just another content management system, or who saw Twitter as just another platform. To me, it's hubris to think that journalists already know everything, and that journalism has already taught them everything. It's a form of denial to think they can just continue doing what they've always done, only using a new set of tools. It's like saying that before they just used pen and paper or a typewriter, now they use a PC (or laptop, or Netbook, or mobile phone, or BlackBerry). This misses the point entirely of how a new age demands new stories and new storytellers.

Charles Leadbeater's quote, "you are what you share", which is included in Gillespie's presentation, to me encapsulates this paradigm shift. We are more than just the actual content we create. We are valued for what we share with the community. We create more value by sharing.

We've already seen what happens when publications try to resist change, when they try to keep their content and the news process a closed system. It's useless to tell people how good you are and how good your content is if you don't make it easy for them to share your content and tell others how great it is.

In fact, stop talking all the time. Listen to what the community is saying. Learn from what they are doing. Because in this confusing new world, traditional media--whether print, broadcast or online--is the johnny-come-lately. Traditional media is the amateur.

True, the information explosion also means there's a lot of noise online, and I do agree that we will need standards and people who will filter content. But what I would like to stress is that this is not necessarily traditional media. We'll always have a demand for good journalists, but you won't necessarily find them staying in traditional news organizations. Those journalists who are passionate, those who intend to innovate, those who are humble enough to admit that we all still have a lot to learn, will find a place in the social space we call the Internet.

As I've said time and again, in different stories, on different media, the Internet is more than just a network of computers (or a network of computer networks). It is, more importantly, a network of people.

Also, while content may be king, context is queen--and we know from chess how strategic and powerful that piece is. We are social creatures, and we write stories, whether we are journalists, or bloggers, or citizen journalists, not just because we want to create content for content's sake, but because we want to create meaning. We want to share meaning. And we want to know what others find meaningful.

All media is social. It's about time we all started acting like we mean what we say.

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