The Disassembling of the Mainstream Media is TIME's Invention of the Year
TIME Magazine writes eloquently about the new media. Through a focused lens staring directly at YouTube, the article captures the rise of new media so well it will make you cry.
A few excerpts:
This is a must read for both the skill in which it is written, as well as the crucial importance of the topic.
A few excerpts:
The third revolution is a cultural one. Consumers are impatient with the mainstream media. The idea of a top-down culture, in which talking heads spoon-feed passive spectators ideas about what's happening in the world, is over. People want unfiltered video from Iraq, Lebanon and Darfur—not from journalists who visit there but from soldiers who fight there and people who live and die there.
The videos may not be slick, but they're real—and anyway, slick is overrated. Slick is 2005. The yardstick on YouTube is authenticity. That's why celebrities like Paris Hilton and P. Diddy can compete with a cute sleepy kitty and a guy doing a robot dance—and lose.
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YouTube is ultimately more interesting as a community and a culture, however, than as a cash cow. It's the fulfillment of the promise that Web 1.0 made 15 years ago. The way blogs made regular folks into journalists, YouTube makes them into celebrities. The real challenge old media face isn't protecting their precious copyrighted material. It's figuring out what to do when the rest of us make something better. As Hurley puts it, "How do you stay relevant when people can entertain themselves?" He and his partners may have started YouTube, but the rest of us, in our basements and bedrooms, with our broadband and our webcams, invented it.
This is a must read for both the skill in which it is written, as well as the crucial importance of the topic.
