New Media

Great article in this week's Economist about the rise of a new form of media: participatory media, as opposed to mass media. It turns out that as a blogger, I'm the forefront of this media revolution. How so? Mass media uses the classic one-to-many approach to disseminate information from content creators to an audience. Participatory media uses a many-to-many approach to disseminate the same information; more like a "conversation" rather than a "lecture". Examples of new media are blogs, podcasts, and Wikipedia. The survey goes on to predict a media revolution on the same scale as the one that happened 600 years ago when Gutenberg invented the movable type. Wow! That a bold prediction. Will these "new media" predictions be as good as the "new economy" predictions of a few years ago? One thing is certain, there is a revolution; we just don't know how deep its impact will be. We'll see...