The sheepskin on the wall behind my computer monitor says I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Florida. What it didn’t say when it was printed in 1982 was that I majored in Public Relations and specialized in Magazine and Feature Writing. Today, I see my decision to switch from straight journalism to a sub-specialized path as a fortunate one.
Yes, Journalism As We Know It Is Dying
You’d have to have been living under a rock over the past few years to have been insulated from the stream of stories and much bemoaning about the fact that newspapers are folding and the ranks of employed professional journalists is shrinking. A crashing economy is only facilitating the inevitable.
I found an excellent blog post discussing the current situation in more depth than I’ll go into here:
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.
When I read stuff like this, I do feel a bit glum because I know that many of my classmates went on to mainstream media jobs and are now facing and fearing very uncertain futures. Clearly, a profession that evolved from some 15th century innovations is dying. In fact, it probably is already dead but the flat-line has yet to register on the monitor. But beyond commiserating with my friends I feel incredibly invigorated because I sense that what is to come of this will be very good.
So, I hope you’ll forgive me if I seem more than a bit impatient: Can we please finish having this wake for Gutenberg’s descendants and get on with it?
Fear of What’s Happening Inside the Cocoon
The new communication truth that social media puts on the table is, to paraphrase an awful, recent Newsweek headline, “We Are All Journalists Now.” The fact of the matter is that humans still need news and many of us consume more of it today than ever before; I know I do. But I don’t read four or five newspapers a day any more to get it. In fact, I stopped subscribing to any newspaper when I moved to Tallahassee six years ago, ending a daily fact of my life that began when I was about six years old. I made the shift to using RSS news readers and Google Alerts to keep me informed and engaged. If anything, I read more news and a broader range of opinion now than I ever have. The demand remains, so I have no doubt that there will be careers for those with old-school journalism skills who are willing to adapt as new models are hashed out. The market for their skills isn’t disappearing, it is just morphing from caterpillar to butterfly very quickly and it’s hard to see inside the cocoon.
When I think about this stuff, I inevitably break the history of human communication down into phases: Communication 1.0 was the path from grunts and gestures to formal spoken language; the advent of written symbols, alphabets and words, usually shared among the elites of various cultures, was Communication 2.0; Gutenberg’s invention ushered in Communication 3.0 and it’s logo, the printing press. In this perspective, the original Internet, Version 1.0, wasn’t really much of an advance over the printing press or over the old overhead projector presentations we suffered when I was in school (for all you youngsters, it’s what we did before PowerPoint).
Fulfilling the Human Need for News
I find it interesting to note that the pathway from Communication 1.0 to Communication 3.0 led to less broad participation in defining and less dependence on interchange between people to create “the news.” The unfulfilled human need for broader interchange in reaching understandings, and I believe it is indeed a “need,” was somewhat ameliorated by the telephone, but as a tool phones offer mostly limited exchanges between two individuals. They generally lack the power to define “news.”
I contend that Communication 4.0, including “Web 2.0” and “Social Media,” is defined by mediums with more distributive freedom than what was offered by the two previous phases of human knowledge exchange; it re-interjects a key element that was made less vital to “news” by them: Conversations in the public square. And the public square is suddenly a heck of a lot larger than it was when tribes were painting on cave walls and carving “news” into rocks. The big idea that unites my Communication Versions model is that in each case an exciting innovation led to epistemological change ; that is, something radically altered the very nature and methods of human knowledge itself. Placed in this framework, social media becomes far more than faddish or trivial.
Ignore at Your Own Risk
So, go ahead and mock Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter if you like, but do not ignore them or think they’ll just go away. What they all are telling you, or, rather, what you should be getting from them so far, is one very important message that includes and goes beyond “news” and promises to be a rule for the future of communication for all organizations: Converse or die.
The old rules no longer apply.
Sun, Mar 15, 2009
In My Opinion, Looking Ahead, Social Media, Web 2.0