A Media Revolution?

We're on the brink of a new era, according to a recent article in the Economist, where mass media is giving way to a new form that is much more personal and participatory. Media will no longer be a sermon received by a passive audience, but a conversation over a network of empowered individual voices:

What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration technologies that are now being developed. “The old media model was: there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out,” says Joe Kraus, the founder of JotSpot, which makes software for wikis.

The obvious benefit of this media revolution will be what Mr Saffo of the Institute for the Future calls a “Cambrian explosion” of creativity: a flowering of expressive diversity on the scale of the eponymous proliferation of biological species 530m years ago. “We are entering an age of cultural richness and abundant choice that we've never seen before in history. Peer production is the most powerful industrial force of our time,” says Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine...

With 57% of teenagers producing new web content themselves, and a new blog being created every second of the day, it's only a matter of time before this revolution drastically changes both media companies and societies. And for this newly-minted blogger, that sounds like a pretty exciting thing.