So what’s with all the talk about the new participatory media? Let me bring this down to you, buddy! So you got a friend who is cool with email, gasp, maybe even has a blog, has 500K followers on Twitter, he shares his digital pics, etc. Yet this very friend is actually very, very old.
- Your friend’s formative years were spent when a conversation was framed by newspaper editorials. Your friend blogs by linking to the above the fold story in the New York Times or some distilled version of the same from the 10 o’clock news.
- You friend finds it comforting that everyone reads the same article at approximately the same time in the morning. He might have discontinued the actual paper delivery but he is fairly certain online and offline everybody wants to talk about the same article.
- This common information denominator provides proven and convenient shield for the dangers of an individual opinion. Your friend’s idea of interesting conversation depends in his successful use of cascading and elaborate quotes; the citations provide a tried and true trick for escaping a personal opinion and a delightful joy for the listeners to boot.
- When your friend is at a lecture or in a conversation he thinks his clever reputation is proportionate to his ability to tie anything that he just heard to an article in the New York Times.
- You friends ideas about the new media is how we can take the MSM message and make it available on all mobile devices and generally make it easier to share and amplify the centralized thinking and feeling.