Anna Jane Grossman, a colleague of my buddy and uber grassroots PR manager, Jamie Diamond, recently published a book called Obsolete, which is a collection of things we used to view as common that are now in the process of disappearing, such as blind dates, mix tapes, porn magazines, body hair, privacy, cash, and… books.
Seeing the book release led me to thinking about other things that are becoming obsolete now due to innovation and new technology. One I thought was worth mentioning is the fear that aggregation by media giants will crush the voice of individual citizens.
When I was in college as well as in the two decades (ouch) since, the brilliant linguist and activist Noam Chomsky has been leading a passionate fight to raise awareness of the dangers of big media companies growing ever bigger through non-stop acquisitions, resulting in a few huge mega-corporations controlling the means of broadcast and communication. With these companies driven mainly to maximize profits for their executives and shareholders, the ability for smaller niche publications and individual iconoclasts to voice their views would be minimized or eliminated.
In the past twenty years, the trend toward conglomeration of media companies has continued. However, during this time, the rise of the Internet and especially Google, Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, has turned upside down the fear that the voice of individual citizens would be drowned out.
- Google, as well as RSS, feed readers, etc., with its ability to find literally anything and everything published on the Web, has fragmented the way users find new information, decreasing the power of traditional media companies to control the means of distribution.
- Blogger and YouTube have made it super simple for anyone to publish their thoughts and ideas, resulting in the largest expansion of publishing and authorship since the invention of the printing press itself.
- Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, with their built-in social graphs and passive news feeds, have made sharing news and opinions faster and more viral than ever before, often cutting traditional media out of the loop entirely.
Of course, government censorship of traditional media as well as user content remains a significant issue in China and many other countries. Also, the decreasing readership and financial decline facing great newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and others raises genuine concern of whether professional investigative reporting will become a casualty of the new patterns of media consumption. However, the explosion in self-publishing as well as end users’ abilities to find, share, and contribute to media has all but made obsolete the idea that media conglomeration will result in the elimination of individual citizens’ ability to freely express beliefs in an open and public forum. For example, glancing through Prof. Chomsky’s web site, I am sure his ability to broadcast his ideas to interested readers is far greater now than when he started giving talks years ago.
Blogging may have its issues and Twitter goes down for a few hours every now and then, however, the rise of self-publishing and distribution is much better than a few media oligarchs controlling what we read and see.
