New Media/Old Media

Just in looking at the coverage of and from Iran, and from the prism of this blog for the Gleaner, I can’t help but think about the convergence of new and old media. Look at this cover for Time Magazine below.

It’s great! It’s not about new media vs old media. And now, with the restrictions the Iranian Government placed on foreign journalists, and with state media being biased, users of new media, through their tweets and cell phone cameras and videos and blogs and youtube posts have captured the spirit and flavour of history in the making (we hope!).

Amateur photo from Tehran, sent to AP

Journalists have often been called authors of the first drafts of the history books, but now, the people living history in the making are the authors of their own.

Not that traditional/old media doesn’t have a place, and here’s why I’m writing about this. I’ve always felt that tweets and blogs, by themselves, aren’t appealing to me – sometimes they’re rambling, unedited personal opinions with no bearing on me. Op-Ed pieces in reputable, old media sources are usually done by respectable, learned people who know what they’re writing about. Blogs etc were more like ‘Letters to the Editor’, a sort of vox populi, but ultimately, not news in and of itself.

But technology’s changed all that. I’m writing a blog, aren’t I? It’s connected the global community in such a way as never before. We can call the whole globalization thing from the world of economics as connecting us (banks failing in Country A can affect Country Z halfway around the world). But those situations are usually nameless and faceless, at least beyond official reports and statements. Tweets and blogs and youtube posts bring us unfiltered sights, sounds and words in near-real-time, so we get a sense of the pulse, flavour and energy of the global community.

Now the venerable old media have picked up on the trend. Look at the segments on CNN looking at what the blogs are saying; anchors tweet during broadcasts. And while a lot of discussions were held regarding the death of old media (newspaper ad revenues and readerships are down in many main cities in the US etc, and some have been forced to slash production and staff), this has been attributed to the shift in readership to the internet for stories. I’m sure there are a lot of readers of the Gleaner (and dare I say Observer?) who go to the online versions of these papers to get local news when they’re in the US or UK or wherever.

But this is different. The stories in the online editions of newspapers are virtually the same as the paper ones. But in a world where news cycles have shrunk, and breaking news are often accompanied by admittedly sometimes grainy footage (9/11, the landing of that USAirways jet in the Hudson, Iran), the general public, armed with their little pieces of consumer technologies, become co-opted into the media circus (you hear CNN and other news agencies appealing for viewers to send in their comments and/or pictures etc).

And therein is my point. Whether it’s new or old media, we’re getting information and the world is getting smaller. Once upon a time, town criers were the main news media. Newspapers were new media. Then radio. Then television. Then the internet. All still exist (well, at least in Jamaica, those town criers now have loudspeakers attached to their car roofs announcing some political rally or result). So there will be more new media coming, and current new media will become old media, but will not become dead media.

We’re no longer passively passing through time. And benign technologies (cell phones, PCs, email) that connect us are now doing more than that – they’re uniting us. All it requires is a common purpose.