Rohit Bhargava wrote an interesting post today on Microsharing. The premise is fairly straight forward and is based around the concept of democratization of media.
Democratization of media is a new buzz word that I’m sure will soon become a fresh new description for upper and middle class executives looking for a promotion, but that aside it’s a fairly interesting concept – though, by no means, a new one. The idea is that anyone can get their content to anyone else in the world.
The past often held models with a judgemental middleman, a stop gap that could, and more than likely would, prevent you from contacting the people that might have had a use for your content. Producers, recording label executives, publishers, etc.
The idea is that today, with instant access internet, we’re doing away with those old modes of business and communication and moving into one in which everyone has a fair shot. Anyone can compete with Wal-Mart or the New York Times on their own turf and keep their content within their own control.
And the democratization of media is the keystone holding all new media in place. From blogs, vlogs, microblogs, news-sharing sites, to the mom and pop store in Arizona selling tumble weeds online for a premium, everyone has the potential to benefit from instant access to potential customers.
Rohit posits a pretty good theory. In essence it appears that the stop-gap, the middle man between your content and its consumers is still there. He appears invisible because he is among your consumers, but he has taken the place of your producer/publisher.
Here’s how Rohit breaks it down:
- Content Creator
- Content Sharer/Microsharer
- Content Consumer
The group is also a triangle with the creator at the top and the consumer at the bottom, with the size of divisions representing the size of the groups:
So, is this a good thing or a bad thing for content creators and consumers?It would appear that there is a lot of potential for abuse. My first thought is that you’re trading one filtering mechanism for another. One person is capable of being just as elitist as another, and if the producers and publishers of the old model had a few bad traits, it’s just as likely that the new ones will. But, on the other hand, there are more sharers than there were producers/distributors, which opens up a wider world with more distributed tastes.
For examples of negativity in the new model you might point to sites like digg. Digg is an interesting phenomenon in this model, because it is a site dedicated to sharers working together, and it’s rife with bad deeds. People using their rank on the site to trample others and to stop their content from being shared.
On the more positive side you can look at twitter and Susan Reynolds’ pea movement, where the sharers enabled a message to spread faster than any other method could.
In the end, I think we’re moving toward a more democratic model that will only further refine itself. There are problems with the new media model and its democratization, but i think the tendency is toward better communication and less power in the hands of the sharers. And, in the end, all of this just further refines and clarifies the final product that ends up in the hands of most consumers.
