The Demise Of Social Media And The Return Of Mass Media

Interesting article on the failed promise of social media. There is a major change here and I am not sure i agree with the author. Old media was about getting all your news from a single source, maybe a couple. You read a specific newspaper, watched a certain evening news show. Those Mass media outlets had you as a captive customer. What has changed is that they are still the sources but we are all getting a little bit from each of them, the bits they are better at. Social Media plays the part of the editor and aggregator. I am much more interested in knowing what my network think is interesting news than what the editor of the new york times thinks I should be looking at. This is all goodness as the mass media outlets are forced to work a little bit harder for our attention. And the promise of social media itself is not completely dead. I read a lot of material from individual writers and bloggers who are not part of the mass media outlets. But to say that the majority of our media was going to come to us that way was always far fetched.