After seeing Alex d'Arte talk at Criativa 08, the first thing that I thought about his speech, which publicity should be pulled instead of pushed and how entertainment is the key, was that the media (there) was all wrong. Heck! The media in Portugal is wrong. They're doing the wrong way and against their real audience. If fact, on long run, they'll be loosing their audience, as today kids become tomorrow grown ups.
The media today employs a lot of people, it's full of desire for advertisers and this market moves a lot of money, lot of mouths and jaguars do feed. So saying that the internet will kill the tv star, is to say that someone is going postal. That will never happen. TV is a institution and therefor serves a lot of markets and people. TV in some cases educates and it's the only way to people get informed and entertained. Yet, it's a push world. There's no interaction with the user. Media people dump information down the tube, people at home see it. Sure they can zap, they can even turn off TV, but then again, in the following morning they have a feeling of being less educated than that neighbor that watched the news, movie or saw that guy how failed on some show. That day will be long and in the elevator people don't have talk. Still, it's a push world. We need to see whenever some media people scheduled it, for our supposed market needs. But does this need to be changed ? Of course! People aren't no longer passive lurkers. They want to interact, to talk, to seek more information as they don't see TV anymore as the final authority on the world or subjects. They stopped being lurkers and become producers. They schedule their own programs, they skip ads, turn on whenever they want and watch the news from the start, from different stations at the same time, they interact and make their own cultural plans, in a world called INTERNET. That's the future. The media just realized that too late and still they're fooling around with the internet, as hell on earth. Sure that's their problem, but people realized that the future is not TDT or HDTV. It's the experience and the internet beats the crap out of it. We see that on the DVD series that are sold everyday, on the news sources that people read from the internet, the music that they don't saw on MTV anymore, the inexistent of tv shows for kids on weekend mornings, the lack and unprepared journalists that do any kind of subjects, with no in depth analysis. Sure the future is experience and internet, sure is on demand but where can the actual media help ? Will it have their space? I think so, but not on the actual concept. They need to shift to became the mentors and tube for the prosumer - the producer consumer -, that's were they can fit in. Helping these amateurs producing for consumers, not breaking the cycle, but rather taking part of it as mentor, as the people that know more than the average user and has the means for amateurs that are willing to produce to their own niche or market. Becoming a platform and not a product or a service. That's were I think that media should be. So, today an article pop on my feed. It's called "Progressive Internet Entrepreneurs", by Jeffrey Chester, which is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. He talks about the big digital media and mergers and how they backup the actual media and system. He urges people, as he calls digital natives, to shift and change this to a better "communitainment", where the entertainment is made by the community. It's a "a progressive media action plan" : http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080616/chester/print As someone said; "it's not the end that counts anymore, it's the medium". //VD _______________________________________________ tce mailing list [email protected] http://lists.paradigma.pt/mailman/listinfo/tce
