Spoke Monday at Digital Hollywood at the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica, then returned late last night, so missing the next three days of panels and speeches. (Try typing Loews into your iPhone, and it keeps miscorrecting it to Loess. Weird bug.)
The topic of our 80-minute panel was "Personalized Media Platforms – Widgets, User Generated Media,
News, Music, and Blogs." Panelists were:
- Michael Spiegelmann, Senior Director, Yahoo! Music
- JD Lasica, Co-founder, OurMedia.org
- Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix
- Marc Goodman, Director, North America Marketing Group, Alcatel-Lucent
- Patrick Moorhead, Director of Emerging Media, Avenue A | Razorfish
- James Hirsen, Entertainment Editor, Newsmax
(One quibble about the conference, which I typically attend twice a year: In 2008, is it really acceptable for a major conference not to have wi-fi? I wasn’t about to pony up to the Loews to pay for it individually.)
We covered a lot of ground, including social media experiences, virtual worlds, citizen journalism, how the economic downturn is affecting the new media and Internet TV industries — and, surprisingly, a whole lot of time focusing on changing social mores around technology.
I repeated my mantra that the "filter" (gatekeeper role) of the traditional media can serve a beneficial purpose but more often than not turns into a conventional wisdom echo chamter where self-appointed gasbags declare winners and losers and play up or ignore news stories on their own whims, with little rhyme or reason. To get a gauge of a segment of the public’s thinking on the election, don’t turn on CNN, MSNBC or Fox, but turn to election.twitter.com.
I also repeated my admonition for users not to take items at face value because they read it on the Internet. The responsibility has been passed on to us to vet and fact-check blog posts and email rumors — you know about Snopes.com, right? — before passing them along to friends or co-workers.
And I talked about the cultural impact of the new social media technologies over the past several years: Five to 10 years ago, if you shot video in public places you might get hassled by the police (and still might in some places). Today, media sharing is the norm. We’ve seen a shift from closed, proprietary networks like AOL toward open and semi-open networks and platforms. Traditional norms of privacy are falling away as the digital generation, and the young in particular, embrace the ethos of transparency, media sharing and, to some extent, GPS location awareness. And mass media continue to give way to fragmented niche media at an accelerating pace.
Chris Tolles and I were not concerned, as another panelist was, about the media consumption habits of young people coming up in the workforce. As Chris said, when that 24-year-old office worker is stumped by a problem, he’ll have a much larger support network to draw upon, including old friends he went to high school or college with.
Related to this: Larry Magid’s Digital Crossroads column today: Technology as a uniter, not a divider. Excerpt:
A survey
last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that
married couples with minor children "have higher rates of Internet and
cell phone usage, computer ownership and broadband adoption than other
household configurations."The numbers are quite impressive.
Fifty-eight percent of "married-with-children" households own two or
more computers while nearly two-thirds of those multi-computer
households have them linked in to a home network. Nearly nine out of 10
such households own multiple cell phones and 57 percent of their
children (ages 7 to 17) have their own cell phone. …I have no studies to back
this up, but my kids — ages 22 and 24 — are in contact with many of
their middle school, high school and college friends thanks to AOL
Instant Messenger, Facebook, cell phones and e-mail. …
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
“To get a gauge of a segment of the public’s thinking on the election, don’t turn on CNN, MSNBC or Fox, but turn to election.twitter.com”
So true, the medias will be less and less in control and that is interesting. Also a lot more people turn to blog reading and stuff like that instead of the traditional newspaper!