The days of the three pillars of print, radio and television are clearly crumbling and a new, exciting phase of media democratisation is unfurling. It involves more people sharing more views across more and more diverse media. Whilst we are witnessing a flourishing new-age media the challenges remain for the new media to gain a collective attention and the consumers to find a way of sifting through the dross.
You can sit in a hotel room anywhere in the US and click through literally hundreds of TV channels of rubbish. Whilst opening up the airwaves over the years has provided more opportunities for the wider public to have a voice, the quality has certainly dropped. You click a hundred times and there's still nothing of quality you would want to watch. And this growth of diversity also splits the advertising dollar so that the larger content producers can no longer afford to produce decent, well-researched and scripted programming.
'But it's our right to have our say on the airwaves'. That cry has encouraged governments in the west to de-regulate the broadcast spectrums around the world to find space for (what we call in Australia) Community Broadcasting. This sector has certainly seen a growth in truly dynamic broadasting through the proliferation of community broadcasting. This has also seen smaller geographic and social communities better represented on the Australian airwaves.
And now we have a flourishing internet with even more diverse media content. But any wade through a site like You Tube will prove the point that opening up the media for everyone doesn't necessarily promise quality as well. Indeed most of the original content is just mindless ravings or crap from a keen but unskilled populus.
Ditto with blogs and social websites. A proliferation of content, but little that actually adds to our media tank. The tank is an awful lot larger than it used to be but it could be argued that the good stuff at the bottom is much the same depth today as it was 20 years ago.
"Be assured that a walk through the ocean of today's media would scarcely get your feet wet'. (A variation of Desiderata)
So, that's the challenge. Freeing up and opening the media to a vibrant new wave of technical platforms and diverse views. Whilst at the same time maintaining a semblance of quality.
Exciting times ahead.
The Spin continues to look at the New Media every Tuesday from 7 - 8pm on JOY 94.9
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