Desultory Musings on Content, Conversation, TV

Charlie O’Donnell just blogged that his rss reader is full of feeds published by people he knows, and I have noticed that more and more I find myself subscribing to less content produced by “foreign” writers and more content produced by my social network.  An important point Charlie neglects in his recent post is the distinction between subscription and consumption: though I myself am subscribing and discovering more through twitter and feeds published my my friends, content often originates from a foreign source such as mainstream political news, bands signed by labels (often 30 years ago!), big pictures/films.  Certainly the amount of indy-content I consume is on the rise, but the bigger trend I see is not indy-content, but indy-distribution of mainstream content via social context and conversation tools.

Another somewhat controversial point Charlie makes in his post is that it’s not worth reading blogs that you’re not commenting on. Granted this is a bit extreme, but to a large extent, Charlie is exactly right.  Almost all of the media we consume derives a majority of its value not innately, but from the social acts of discussing and sharing the content.

I was recently sharing with @JoshAuerbach my new opinions on TV. Throughout high school and college, I rejected TV as an utter waste of time. Given my context, this was exactly true: I was reading great literature, learning about science and math, discussing these topics every day at school with other students. My community was totally immersed in the same content I was consuming, we were studying similar things, playing sports together, and sharing the same acreage. We had plenty of fodder for day to day conversations, social interactions, and icebreakers.

What I’ve realized since leaving university is the fragmentation of modern society and the perfect timing of the invention of the television. Today, our occupations our so diverse and our geographic sprawl so vast that we literally have no topics for day to day conversation: how can a doctor talk to a farmer, a chemical engineer to a lawyer? With specialization comes fragmentation. We’re no longer all hunters or farmers knowledgeable about herd migrations or seasonal crops. Furthermore, we all live half an hour’s drive from each other, visit different barbers, and shop in supermarkets and walmarts.

As automobiles and greater occupational specialization made possible by technological advances made it more difficult for us to connect with our neighbors, TV, radio, spectator sports, and other mass media gave us common topics of conversation.

Now that I’m no longer in school where I met a new person everyday with whom I could immediately connect, I can see the true value of mass media and understand why social media via the internet is so important.

( It seems I’ve digressed a bit. If I were a professor, 5 minutes of class would be course work, 55 would be tangents.  To bring it back )

I acknowledge Charlie’s trend of more subscriptions to social distribution channels, but I don’t think the majority of content will every be indy. The reason people consume media is to connect with others, so they will gravitate toward topics of conversation that connect them with more people.  Social distribution channels simply result from people doing what they naturally do with media–discussing it–and other smart people using technology to magnify these conversations, elminating the need for traditional mass distribution paths like cable TV or mainstream newspapers.

Though I argue that most content will derive from a mainstream source, I still think we need much more indy publishing. Friends who are not publishing, do so! At the least publish / reblog interesting stuff you find elswehere and get soem conversations started.  Good tools for sharing: tumblr and twitter

* Update: just found another response to Charlie’s post on Bijan’s blog

Related posts:

1. Reading About Twitter Scaling and Some Other Interesting Stuff
2. 2010 Resolutions for the New Year
3. Umair Haque on Facebook, His Blog, & Other Stuff
4. Delicious Thoughts
5. Piping Data Out – How do you monetize an open platform?