Are we being spoilt by having too much choice in a new media world? According to Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post, we are gorging ourselves on this feast, but missing the Ed Sullivan moments.
By this he means a time when families across the US shared a new experience via the Ed Sullivan TV show, such as seeing The Beatles for the first time.
Rather than take issue with his approach, I will point you in the direction of Howard Owens, who makes a good case for distributed media against old fart media.
As he writes:
“This nostalgia for mass media is misplaced. Sure those Ed Sullivan moments were fun, but they were an anomaly. They were moments in time that only a Baby Boomer could love. Mass media is a relic of the 20th Century, the only period in human history in which it existed. For most of our history, communication was much more personal, often far closer to one-to-one than one-to-many. Now we’re in the era of many-to-many, which has more in common with campfire media, is more of a deeply felt personal media, more in keeping with our nature. Mass media wasn’t good for us. Distributed media is better.”
It is understandable that some will hark back to another era in the media. But we cannot pretend that the media is not changing. As with all change, some things are better, some things are worse. I, for one, are encouraged by the possibilities of new media. It all depends on what we do with it.
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