Are We The 8th Mass Media?

September 9, 2008 on 1:45 pm | In Uncategorized |

Peggy Anne Salz of MSearchGroove pointed me to a really interesting post yesterday about the evolution of mass media. It was written by David Cushman on his FasterFuture blog, and after reading through a couple of his articles, I became fascinated with his and other people like Jonathan McDonald’s thought processes on this subject.

I’m going to purloin some content here as background on the previous mass media (extensively covered previously by Alan Moore & Tomi Ahonen):

1st: Print
2nd: Sound Recordings
3rd: Radio
4th: Cinema
5th: Television
6th: Internet
7th: Mobile?
8th: Us??

In fact, as a little aside, there’s a bit worth reading on a blog-style reproduction I’m building of the book my Grandfather wrote about his company on it’s 21st birthday in 1942. If you click here and go to the 4th paragraph down, you’ll see a little bit of New Zealand ‘new media’ history from 1923 :-).

Anyway, back to 2008….

What David Cushman and JMac (in his comment to this post) seem to be saying is that, yes, mobile is the 7th mass media and we (the community) are the 8th (and the 1st paradoxically).

The reasons?

From David in that particular post:

“My best stab right now is “We are the eighth mass media”.

I don’t just mean that we create it in a UGC vs Professional Content Creators kind of way. I mean WE are the distribution, the content, the ‘user journey’, how messages are transmitted… WE are the medium and the media carried within it.

We are the connections. We are also how the connections are made.

It is this that marks the crucial shift, how the connections are made, and which will help us recognise when the eighth mass media emerges.

When we can express our metadata globally in real time, beyond any silos, when we can find other people who want to solve the same problem (who share your purpose) right now as we do, people who will join us in solving it right now (because it also holds value for them, right now), then, the eighth mass media arrives.

And then how value is created really does shift. Group forming with no silos. A new world.”

So let’s assume that this is true for a minute, and it very well could be of course.

Can this really happen without the web being tech-elitist, unless there is total publishing freedom by the masses, not just by people like us who understand how to work Wordpress, html coding and the like?

This whole subject takes me back to June 2005 when I first thought the web should be easy for everyone ie., publish by drag’n'drop and have the software write the code. Back then it was really hard to produce such a platform, but over 2006-08 there have been AJAX and Javascript upgrades, faster and cheaper servers along with increased bandwidth both in broadband and mobile, and vastly more efficient browsers - so has the time come for the masses to be empowered with total graphic and content control over their webspace?

It’s not just us working on this with LiveAps. Roxer in the States are doing a great job (although I would question their recently released $7pm subscription version which seems to me just to give more pages and allow html code insertion. However, in saying that, they can always bring the price down if they fail to gain traction with it so it’s worth a go :-), and there are others moving in this direction from template-based systems.

So regardless of who’s building publishing products, I think they need to meet the following criteria to empower a non-elitist web and community of people who will make up this 8th mass media:

1. Accessible and usable via most common browsers including mobile.
2. Provide two-way access easily to owned data and content from any device.
3. Work by way of drag’n'drop with absolutely no need to upskill to Dreamweaver-like products or html coding (unless just copying and pasting widgets), and have no requirement for a training manual.
4. Be object based.
5. Work just like desktop apps, ie., object layering, grouping, sharing.
6. Provide different content rendering choices for the publisher depending on what sort of devices access the webpages (eg., maybe different content selection and scrolling order for mobiles).
7. Give an opt-in function for what data users would like accessed by what I’ll call the semantic web for now.
8. Be free for non-enterprise users.

Does anyone have anything else to add to this discussion? I have a feeling this might be just the beginning…..