From being in the Audience to becoming a Producer…?

The shift from people being simply observers/consumers of content, to becoming producers can be seen all around… Take for example the simple act of writing a blog post…the one i am making right now. Back in the day this was unheard of. Today, anyone can be their own little mass media outlet, completely run from a laptop…now that is a complete sea-change in terms of content production and distribution. I would not call it a “revolution” simply because it has not had as widespread effect on the population at large as Radio or TV had… Most people still consume media in the form that they are most familiar and comfortable with – TV, radio, and printed news…but that is changing. As technology, in general, becomes more and more easy to use and acquisition costs decreases on a daily basis, the future most likely will favor distributed media model, such as micro blogging for live updates and reporting, blogging for rich media articles, podcasts for live or recorded discussions, and many others. Every day more and more people of all ages switch to digital tech for the reason of consuming multimedia content. Things like eReaders, tablets, and other mobile devices capable of viewing digital multimedia are being adopted throughout society, in businesses, schools, and for personal recreation purposes. As time goes on, we will see more and more of these devices on the market and more and more people using them. It is very likely that the future of mass media will be in the form of distributed model, meaning you will still have large mass media companies, but they will license most content from private entities, bloggers and such, who they deem to have good content and relevancy. Lets wait and see.

In my “community” there was little change simply because of, at least in my point of view, cultural reasons. However, my peers, have embraced the trend because we are younger, much more tech-savvy then our parents and older generations, and we see potential in this technology. It does not mean that we want to become our own news companies or mass media companies. We just simply have the means to contribute our opinions and thoughts on issues we want to discuss. Some see an opportunity for commercial reasons, other just want to be heard. Whatever the reason, the point is that we have the ability to be heard by millions of people, and that’s basically it.

PS: I wrote this entire post in MS Word and then copied it to WordPress… There is something about WordPress that throws my thinking off when i write a paper/article type of post, such as this one. Blogging is a very different experience then writing a paper.