If you haven't come across this post in any of your aggregators, you might want to check it out when you have a chance. It’s a look at the tension between traditional media and those formerly known as the “audience.”
Now I’ll be the first to say that there isn’t anything here that I haven’t heard before in one way or another. However, I was drawn in by the way that post was crafted and I think that you will be too.
The replies and comments that follow are probably more interesting than the post itself. There are quite a few of them and the dialogue that ensues is worth reading.
Think about how your role as a communicator is changing...for that matter, think about how you as a member of "the audience" have changed as well...
What we’re really looking at here is the democratization of authority. Actually it’s not the first time this has happened. The advent of moveable type printing presses during the Renaissance also put “media” tools in the hands of the population. Instead of needing lots of monks and lots of money to have manuscripts copied by hand, anybody who could afford a small tabletop printing press could print their own pamphlets, which people did. They were like the blogs of their day. It’s one of the things that helped fuel the momentum of the Protestant Reformation against the authority of the Catholic Church. People did the same thing here before the American Revolution. The danger of this is that if you go the route of Digg.com (where readers rate stories in a popularity contest to determine what gets coverage), you run the risk of truly important serious news stories losing the popularity contest to stories about beer-drinking dogs.
I guess what I’m saying is that despite all this democratization, there are still stories that everyone needs to read/know about. The same goes for communications inside J&J, and from us to the outside world…this just means we have to be creative about how we present and get people to pay attention to these stories.
Posted by: Margaret | August 09, 2006 at 12:52 PM