Great, DEEP piece about MySpace from Wired
Mr. Media Elite himself – Rupert Murdoch :
“To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.”
After talking about various ways MySpace COULD make money there’s this little ditty . . .
. . . . as lucrative as those ideas may be, they’re based on an old media conception of audiences as consumers.
But MySpace members are something different: They’re participants.
The site’s greatest value isn’t connecting people to products, people to information, or eyeballs to advertisers. It’s connecting people to people.
Think for a minute how this shift – from “consumer to participant” conditions the MySpace generation and their expectations from media – particularly as they get older.
How do we think yesterday’s “gather round the radio” mass-media “message shout” playbook will fly for these people?
How about 5 years from now?
And 10?
This is OUR future – yes? Where do we fit?
More . . .
How? Think of MySpace as an 80 million-screen multiplex where YouTube videos are always showing. Or an infinite radio dial where the DJs spin only the records they want to play.
I’m not bringing this up to suggest radio needs to be like MySpace. It can’t.
I’m bringing this up because the future of media is going to change – radically. Even if WE don’t change a thing – kids will change it themselves. If they can’t (if we won’t let them) – they’ll abandon it and move on to something they can control.
I bring this up because I honestly don’t know where radio (as it’s performed today) fits in this universe.
Any thoughts?
Posted by Jeff Schmidt 
