New Media

When I’m not ruminating on conspiracies in central Asia, I can often be found at local tech events in Vancouver enjoying the company of fellow entrepreneurial-minded geeks. My roundup in Techvibes from DemoCamp last week, where tech start-up people got to tell other tech start-up people why they’re awesome. Highlight of the evening:

Honourable mention must go to Ed Levinson from Analusis, mostly because he was just so darn entertaining, in the tradition of manic street preachers. (Sadly, Ed didn’t actually get to pitch his idea. It went like this):

Sadly, Ed got pulled away at that point. He’d hit the 30-second mark. But I could tell that most of the people in the room wanted to hear more and I will be in touch with Ed to find out precisely what this entrepreneurial mentor was driving at.

Is Google making us all dumber? Or are we evolving to a different kind of intelligence?

“What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence,” he said. “The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”

Think about that for a minute.

Tasty food for thought from Mathew Ingram on why our expectation of privacy has been eroded in the Web 2.0 world:

In the pre-Web era, your privacy was something that was largely under your control, and apart from having your picture appear in the newspaper or on a police blotter somewhere, the risks were fairly limited, and easily understood. Now, the definition of privacy is a lot harder to nail down – and, in fact, differs from person to person – and the risks are (theoretically at least) unlimited.

It’s not all bad. Worried that your future employer is going to check your Facebook photos for incriminating evidence of conduct unbecoming? In a few years, it won’t matter. When everyone has embarrassing photos on the Internet, then employers won’t bother checking, if they really want to hire someone to get the job done.

What is your expectation of privacy in a wired world?

New media attempts to use old media sources to generate content. In return, new media sites help promote digital content of newspapers and magazines. But my colleagues in the literary and journalistic worlds perceive a future where old media plays at best a marginal role.

For anyone who blogs, reads blogs or uses any social networking sites to post or view links, the idealized symbiosis between new media and old media should be obvious. But is it symbiosis or parasitism?

The old paradigm of news delivered in print may be dying, but without good old fashioned investigative reporting by paid journalists, I believe that most of this new media content, including this blog, could not exist.

There’s no doubt that new media news sites like Now Public can provide quality citizen journalism. But even there, how much of the stories on those sites is inspired by previous reporting done by paid professionals?

To take an analogy from renewable energy sources vis a vis fossil fuels, citizen journalism can only do so much to meet our entire information needs as a free society. Finding the right mix will be the challenge of the next decade.

Excerpts from New Media vs Old Media: A Portrait of the Drudge Report 2002-2008, which provide an excellent example of the dependence of new media on traditional media content.

The Drudge Report is one of the founding flag bearers of “new media”: a U.S.–based news aggregator founded in the late 1990s that has developed a reputation for breaking tomorrow’s news today…

In a time when mainstream media is coming under increasing pressure from “new” media, this portrait of one of the Web’s longest–lived and most commercially successful news aggregators paints an image not of a new media paradigm to replace the old, but rather of a symbiotic and highly dependent relationship between old and new…

Free societies depend on massive amounts of information to create an aware population that can provide direction to its elected representatives. If new media kills vast swathes of old media publications, our society may find itself at least temporarily unable to get the information it needs to make informed decisions. Even if plenty of new media news sites rise in the wake of the defeated publications, it is difficult to see how genuine sources of hard investigative journalism will replace the old paid models.

If private companies can’t hack the old media model, a massive expansion of government-subsidized CBC-like entities hardly seems a viable alternative. Even with the best intentions, it could only become a mouthpiece of agitprop. So a private solution will need to make the old print model and purely online new media companies truly symbiotic if we’re going to have access to the information we need in the future.

If companies want to build their brands through social media, they’ve got to give up the kind of control that is the holy grail of traditional corporate communications.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the PR strategy of Olympics organizers, who are caught between old and new worlds of community engagement. New media is about free participation and building a community, and VANOC’s approach offers a lesson in recognizing the fine line between sabotaging community relations with excessive control and letting the bloggers run wild.

Read the rest of my BC Business column about how businesses can build a social media strategy on top of their traditional communications and marketing capabilities (and avoid the pitfalls of trying old tactics in a new medium), Let’s Get Social. Enjoy.

PS: What do you think of the cartoon image Antony Hare drew for me? I think it’s pretty cool.

PPS: Kris Krug was kind enough to update me the other day on the status of his alternative media centre for the Olympics, the True North Media House. Since they didn’t actually have a name for their group when I interviewed him, the place-holder name being tossed around at the time of the inverview was the Independent Media Centre, which I abbreviated in the article as IMC. I’m informed there is already an IMC that is not at all related to True North Media House, so where you read IMC in my column, please translate it as True North Media House, to avoid confusion.

KK also took exception to the following line in my column: “IMC spokesperson and web 2.0 entrepreneur Kris Krug says the people behind his group are overwhelmingly pro-Olympics and pro-business and are not remotely related to such groups as the new-media anarchists behind the Resistance 2010 campaign, with their No Olympics on Stolen Native Land motto”

While I was strictly correct in that the True North Media House is not the same organization as the Resistance 2010 campaign, Kris wants to make clear that anarchists and people of all stripes and affiliations are welcome under the big tent that is True North Media House. Glad we cleared that up.