New Media: Embracing Mediocrity or Unearthing Excellence?
Even diamonds are hidden amongst tons of rock.
So, is new media embracing mediocrity or unearthing excellence? This is a question that comes up whenever a form of media is opened up to the masses. It has been discussed with desktop publishing, blogging, audio podcasts and now with video. Every time, people weigh in with their opinions on the occurrence. I’m weighing in as well because I think this is an important topic now for several reasons.
The first reason is that many people feel like the media, (old media, the man, whatever you want to call it) is letting us down. The media is controlled by a small group of corporations, which are easily bought up and controlled by people or corporations that don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart.
The second reason is that the media usually shoots for the middle ground, the safe bet, for content that doesn’t offend too many people and isn’t too unique. Otherwise, people could potentially be discouraged from watching. That results in a lot of good content never being produced, some great content being cut short (like Firefly) and some content that people think is no longer up to its previous high quality, continuing long past its prime.
The third reason is that we will soon have a way to sift through the vast amounts of available content to find the content that we are looking to consume. This is important because it doesn’t matter if there are hundreds of amazing blogs, podcasts or videos that we would be overjoyed to consume, if we never find them.
I believe that at each point in time when access to a given medium was widened to include more people, that some great content was produced that would not otherwise have been produced. The creation of the printing press was one of the most dramatic examples of this happening. No longer were only a few books copied by monks or scholars for those rich enough to commission them. Instead, many more books and papers were produced and some were by previously unknown authors. In those days, sorting through the content was still easy though. There wasn’t very much to sift through and only some of it was available in any given location.
With the advent of computers and the internet though, the cost of creating content has crept down to where it is almost accessible to everyone. Many people have seen this as a problem because since anybody can produce content, everyone will. And since everyone will produce content, there will be so much to sift through that nobody will find the good stuff buried beneath the dreck. That hasn’t proven to be the case though because time and time again good content has been filtered from the massive amounts of junk out there. That’s not to say that all the good stuff is found, but enough that opening up the creation of media to the masses has been worthwhile.
At this point in time, I am even more enthusiastic about the opening up of content creation to the masses. That is because as time progresses, the ability to surface good content will improve, despite the larger and larger quantities of content available. Already, sites like Digg, Yahoo! Buzz and even YouTube provide ways to see what content is most popular. Content like this 5 minute video that was produced for $300, put up on YouTube and then rewarded with a $30 million movie deal.
Add in social media capabilities, such as finding out what content is popular amongst your friends, who ostensibly like things that you are more likely to be interested in, and we have the beginnings of a way to find the best content for someone like you. If you then add in the history of the content that you have liked and disliked over time, an even better filter could be designed. So, with time, content that you enjoy will surface more and more often. And the more people that are producing and consuming content, the better results you will get. That won’t happen overnight, but give it a few years and Google, Microsoft or a smaller, nimbler company will come along and put the next large piece in place to help us to discover the content that each of us would personally consider excellent.
So, to answer the question, we don’t embrace mediocrity. We accept it as the rough diamond from which a stellar gem is hewn. We cut through it and discard what we don’t want and revel in the beauty that remains.
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You are right. There is so much new media out there that it is hard to see what is best. It is also expensive to keep on buying the new technology available in TVs and videos.