It's been a week of seismic shifts in the media landscape...and not in the way you might have at first imagined. As Shelly Palmer points out on his blog, there are some real reasons why the Imus situation didn't just blow over.
"Three years ago, if someone heard something on "Imus in the Morning" that made them angry, they had few choices. They could call WFAN-AM's switchboard and complain. Write a letter (e-mail or snail mail) to the station, the local affiliated station or MSNBC. "
Of course, he's right. The ability for real people to engage in the dialogue, review or rewind the tape - and listen again - didn't exist. The ability to have Imus's words 'on demand,' and to be able to go back and look at prior statements of Imus is a relatively new phenomenon. Access to that material created a conversation both about Imus and Race that was nuanced, complex, and inclusive. People participated. Advertisers listened. The tide rose, and both advertisers and then media companies reacted. But this wasn't a controversy fueled by coverage. It was a discussion facilitated by the web. And that change - this new found accountably on the part of the media to its audience - isn't going to go away.
If your not sure about this, take a look for yourself.
The videos posted run the gamut. But they are the voice of media consumers who are now part of the media mainstream. It is worth stopping and taking note.
At the same time, the tragedy at Virginia Tech was another consumer media moment that reflects a change in the way we make, share and consume media. I first heard about the shooting in a Google News Alert. The first video I saw was on a web site called Daily Motion (a French video sharing site) and it was a video shot by a bystander on his cell phone. The change in the way this news was recorded and disseminated is a sign of the emergence of consumer created content. The tools to make, share and organize this kind of media are just reaching the hands of average folks.
Then, there is the media created by Seung Hui Cho. Clearly he understood that he was creating a media 'press release' that would outlive him. In fact his death would be the event that would make the photos and videos 'newsworthy.' He knew that. But here the public, which was anxious to both see consumer content in the form of cell phone video, and engaged in creating thousands of pieces of video in the form of Tribute Videos, reacted vehemently. In the same way that real people drove the Imus story that resulted in his inevitable dismissal - here there was genuine anger at NBC for its use of the murderer's self-made diatribe and preening pre-attack photos. While Mainstream Media went to pains to explain their use of the content, the reality is that the decision to promote the material as 'exclusive' and to use it to drive tune-in was objectionable, and viewers now have a real-time mechanism to register that objection. They did.
And as if this week didn't have enough terrible news...there was the sudden passing of Kurt Vonnegut. Perhaps not surprisingly - Vonnegut did something to make his mark, even in his passing. He creates a clue about what immortality may look like in our new virtual world. As Wayne Porter discovered in his exploration of the grid of Second Life.
So in a chilling parallel, both Vonnegut and Cho live on - virtual media selves that reach beyond the grave. Vonnegut's immortality is a sign of the web's power to amplify and archive wonderful creative minds. Cho's immortality is less welcome, and profoundly disturbing. Would Cho have been inclined to act if he hadn't known that he could push the buttons of the media machine? We'll never know the answer. But we do have Virtual Kurt - and in virtual land, Kurt kicks Cho's ass... that's for sure.