(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...The world is flat. The world is flat. The world is flat. The “worst” thing about the new media is that it is going to make everything way more populist: entertaining, provocative, tawdry, controversial, and titillating. Sounds good to me. Caveat Lector is what I have to say: reader beware. The unwashed masses are now publishing like mad, it is up to you to control how down and dirty you get.
Pop culture has never been reflected in the peach pages of the Financial Times or the sticky pages of the New Yorker. All the content on the Internet, the Blogosphere, and inert Web 2.0 platforms have been around since the 50s; however, until recently, the mediasphere wasn’t flat, wasn’t horizontal. The media wasn’t a free market, it was a global, intentional, civics lesson from the elite for the benefit of the common man, whatever that is. I think it may be a secret code for “masses of morons with sixth grade education who chew tobacco” but I am not certain.
Until the Internet, the media elite took it upon themselves to be stewards of us, the “normal folks.” It was their holy responsibility to train us up, to deliver us our culture the way many take the Host on Sunday. It didn’t need to be attractive, it didn’t need to be delicious, and it didn’t need to include a relationship, but it was fortifying. It was the responsibility of High Culture to help us pick ourselves up. Noblesse oblige.
Web 2.0 is America. Talk Radio is America. Reality TV is America. MySpace is America. Born Again is America. Creationism is America. Wal-Mart is America. NASCAR is America. Pornography and gambling is America. Vegas and Texas and Florida is America; we self-righteous high-culturists in NYC, DC and SFO, attending our foreign films and book clubs, whinging about the decline of good breeding are the school-marmish Women’s Temperance Unionist of today. In the end, whisky-swilling and terbacky-spittin’ will prevail. That’s America, and that’s Web 2.0.
Geoff Livingston interviewed me on his blog, The Buzz Bin, this morning, A Social Media Conversation with Chris Abraham. Please check it out and add The Buzz Bin to your feeds. Thanks so much, Geoff!
Filed under: New Marketing, New Media, Social Meda
Loading ...
Leave a Reply