Fun Friday: Social Media in Silicon Valley
The Social Media Club held one of their renowned discussions on trends in social media in Silicon Valley this week (at NBC11's new facilities). Discussions were held in a "round-table" fashion on topics such as ethics in Internet media, tracking accountability in reports, localization of reporting, the diminishing value of professional journalism, GenY's and community media, and many others.
I spent most of my time in ethics and youth media, but one of the topics fascinated me - the problem of enticing and overcoming resistance to viewing in-depth media (like news stories and thought-pieces) in a sound-bite Internet-minute world. It's no mystery that there's a lot of stuff competing for your attention, from screaming banner ads to link farms loaded with trash. On most portals (especially video portals such as YouTube) the flea market prevails - maybe you'll find something good, but mostly it's junk. And as junk rises to the top of the charts, more junk is tendered, crowding out works that actually might be good for you. The Internet, instead of appearing as a rich knowledge base of the world degrades to a monoculture of junk food media. So if you do have something of value, how do you convince a viewer that it is worthwhile to spend the time? And this is where Jane Austen and the telcoms come into play...
It's hard to get people to take any media on the Internet seriously when there is so much that clearly is not serious there for the taking. But this is likely due to the very recent bandwidth bottlenecks that kept good habits from forming early on. Think about it - if you were only allowed to eat quick nibbles of food, would you grab an apple or a bag of chips? If you were used to preparing and eating a good meal every night, you might be very hard-put to making due with a junk meal - you wouldn't want to give up your good habits. Same with the Internet, really. People got used to poor quality media transmitted in low-res formats over slow links. Telcoms in the US are so intent on milking the bandwidth that we've fallen behind most of the industrialized world in Internet access and usable bandwidth, and wireless has only very recently begun to erode this stranglehold, but we have a long way to go. This is likely one reason why the US is dropping in ranking of innovation - all you have to do is look at the countries ahead of us and correlate them to Internet access. The results are striking...
But perhaps we're not also thinking a bit more simply. As an example - this week I felt in the mood for a Jane Austen work, but I wasn't sure which one. I had recently reread "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility", and I ran out of ideas. So I searched on the topic and found a nice site which not only synopsized the books but also had the complete works online to read, so I read "Mansfield Park" (I hadn't read it for many years) on my laptop. Yes, I read the entire book over the course of several evenings, bookmarking where I left off for the next chapter. And I enjoyed it.
Perhaps in the rush to find a way to monetize websites with annoying ads and scams, we've forgotten there are many good sites out there that actually provide a value (what's the cost of an out-of-copyright paperback in stores - about $7-$10). Libraries also have these works, but the library was closed. This doesn't mean I won't go the library anymore or that I won't buy a book, but it did satisfy my craving for a bit of intellectual exploration. And maybe that's the trick for getting people to actually pay attention and stay on a site for a while. After all, junk food may indulge us, but a well-prepared feast is what truly sustains us.