Read Rosen
: I have been sinfully remiss in not pushing you to read Jay Rosen’s year-end round-up of the top 10 ideas about media in 2004. I was waiting for Jay to finish writing up all 10 but that’s taking longer than I thought it would — Rome was not abstracted in a day — and so I’ll make up for lost time and send you there now. One of my big trends for 2004 was learning from Rosen. He embodies that amazing academic talent for taking a complex world and abstracting it into clear concepts that can be investigated and studied and debated. His list for the year is classic Rosen, clear, heavy with meaning, and spot-on:
1. The Legacy Media.
2. He said, she said, we said.
3. What the printing press did to the Catholic Church the blogging press does to the media church.
4. Open Source Journalism, or: “My readers know more than I do.”
5. News turns from a lecture to a conversation.
6. “Content will be more important than its container.”
7. ‘What once was good–or good enough–no longer is.”
8. “The victory of affinity over geography.”
9. The Pajamahadeen.
10. The Reality-Based Community.
He explores the first four here, the fifth here, and the sixth here.
To me, the abstraction of the abstraction of all this comes down to one word: power. It’s all about a shift of power from those who’ve had it to those who initially owned it and licensed it: the citizenry. And this is not happening just in media, of course. It is happening in marketing and advertising and commerce and culture and politics and may even come to government. But because the tools at work mimic media — though they are more than media tools — media is, for once, on the front edge of the trend. But it’s a trend that will come to the rest of society. There’s a quiet revolution underway. The people are taking back their power again.
