What about the future?

by Sharon Robins

The media guardian, 24th November 2009, reports After social networks, what next? 

The bits I found interesting:  LinkedIn founder, Reid Hoffman; “ I think the phenomenon of the online relationship empowers our personal and professional life. 

You might think, ‘who wants to consume all this useless information?’ but with some information it’s like with ice cream.  It is not nutritious but people still eat it.”

Surely the Flake is nutrious?

Dr Kate Blackmon, an Oxford lecturer says the future is not about crowd sourcing but crowd filtering. 

I would go one further after the chats I’ve had with newsy people and say a news team especially needs to crowd source and then it needs to crowd filter.  Maybe Kate had said; “not so much about crowd sourcing but more crowd filtering.”  Context can easily be changed by a lost word or two.

Just consider Emily Bell, Director Digital Content at the Guardian with 6,000 Twitter followers.  Surely she doesn’t read all their tweets; not with three children and a husband too? 

But those followers are access to a massive contact list who also have contacts.  Thousands of sources.

Back to the article where CEO of Twitter, Biz Stone said;  “I believe in the trend of openness.  Using an open technology, creating an open platform and being more transparent.  That is where we are heading.”

He also said Twitter isn’t a social network it’s an information network. 

Rosabeth Moss Kanter , Professor at Harvard Business School, believes success hinges on connectors making and expanding that information network; On Twitter and in the Workplace, It’s Power to the Connectors

She says; “Power goes to the connectors; those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups.  Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment. 

In essence, she who has the best network wins.”

Video Games and Journalism

I have read Philip Trippenbach’s essay on Video Games: a New Medium for Journalism. He makes some interesting observations:

• despite the recession, sales are growing at double-digit rates, while other media sales figures are steady, or declining.
• 48% of 16-29 year olds are ‘active gamers.
• There are more gamers than football fans in the UK and video games outsell both movies and music.
• gamers as a group are more interested in politics – and more politically active – than non-gamers

Philip Trippenbach  says “Where games really come into their own is as a medium for deep explanatory journalism – especially journalism about complicated systems with many interrelationships, interacting forces and factions”.

“These can be important situations to understand, such as factional politics on the streets of Baghdad in 2005-06, or the complicated realities of the global fight against malaria”.

The BBC and other news providers currently struggle to engage younger audiences. Video games could prove to be the medium that solves this problem.

Dr. John Pavlik talks about his new book Media in the Digital Age. There is a bit about video games towards the end.

Sofia