Media in the New Millennium

Editors’s Note: Since we’re ready to pass the first 10 years of the new millennium, all of us here at the Media in the New Millennium blog thought we look at some specific changes to the media, PR and communications industry. This is the first in a series from the Metzger staff.

posted by Doyle

When I was a kid, my grandmother loved to listen to a radio show called, if I remember right, “The Radio Garage Sale.” A few times every week for a couple of hours each time, a local radio station allowed listeners to call the station and go on the air to buy, sell or barter. A typical call might be something like:

“I have a red sofa I’d like to sell for $25. It’s in great condition, and I just bought it last year. But, I just got new curtains and the sofa really doesn’t match the room any longer. If you’re interested, you can call me at 635-2951.”

Listeners would call those with offers they were interested in.

Sounds funny, doesn’t it?

However, doesn’t it also sound a lot like eBay? I think it does. In fact, I believe the rise of social media we’ve been experiencing is less of a change in the way we act and more of a change in the tools we use. Let me explain.

Humans, for the most part, are social creatures. We want to talk to others. When we don’t like something, we want to tell someone. When we have a good experience, we like to share it with others. We don’t really like to be talked to, but rather, spoken with. We like to have influence over our world and what we bring into it.

For example, when I was a kid, I could call the disk jockey at the local radio station and request a song, and more often than not, he’d play it. Then came media consolidation. I couldn’t call the DJ anymore, because he wasn’t local. He said the time was “20 after the hour” instead of “20 after 8” because he was talking to several time zones. If we didn’t like something, or wanted to ask for something different, we could send a letter or call a receptionist, but that was about it.

Social media — from Facebook to Twitter to comments after a story in the New York Times Online — allows us to talk to each other and to those that provide content, from a blogger to a nationally syndicated columnist. Craigslist and eBay give us a forum to sell the things we no longer want and find a good deal on the things we’re looking to buy.

So what’s happening? Access to the Internet and the development of social media sites has allowed us to take small conversations and put them out to a potentially global audience. Instead of clipping a story from a newspaper and sending it to a co-worker in an inter-office envelop (remember those?), I can now post the link on Twitter, sharing it with thousands in just seconds. And I can see what other people who are interested in the same things as me are reading. Does Jeremiah Owyang, formerly of Forrester Research and now with The Altimeter Group, have time to send me a personal news clipping? No, but I can read his tweets and follow the links, and the benefit is the same.

So the fundamental shift, to me, is not rise of the conversation, but the rise of the public conversation. When we tell a few friends about a coffee place we really like by posting on Facebook, the conversation can easily be seen by others, forwarded and linked to. The same is true for complaints, requests for help, opinions — you name it.

Is this a fad? Only if sharing our thoughts and ideas with others is a fad, and it seems to me it’s been going on for thousands of years. The tools will undoubtedly shift and change (we’ve seen that already. Anyone still using Friendster every day?), but the fundamental shift — taking our voices to an easy-to-use, online public forum — is here to stay.

What’s your take?

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