Yesterday I had the great privilege of joining a terrific end-of-year conversation on Joesph Jaffe’s podcast Jaffe Juice. I crashed a party of great personalities to talk about the health and future of podcasting as a medium, which used the TalkShoe service for the audio conference recording as well as a chat room that seemed to contain about 50-60 people.
Between the audio and text discussion, I was struck by the idea that there seems to be, at least with some people, a frustration at how podcasting and by extension related forms such as blogging are evolving. Whether it’s concern about up-take by the public at large or about podcasting being co-opted by corporate interests or whatever particular issue causes hands to ring and brows to furrow, there nearly always seems to be something in these kinds of conversations that causes folks to say “how can we change it?”
The piece of advice for 2009 I’m offering to everyone in the new media community, myself included, is as follows: RELAX.
Podcasting is, by most counts, no more than 5-6 years old. Blogging isn’t much older, and even the web is only about 10 years old. That sounds like forever to those of us work and socialize on the Internet, but it isn’t. Time seems to go slowly when you’re thinking about something all the time, but for most folks who are not paying attention to blogging or podcasting or the like everyday, these things are still brand new.
For those of us who believe in the power of emerging (and already emerged!) media, the very best thing that we can do is keep using them and finding the ways they work best for us, whether its for business use, personal use or some combination thereof. The larger state of the media will take care of itself — it’s still a very worthy topic for discussion, but not something we should get too worked up about trying to change in a broad sense. As the song says, que sera, sera. I’m certainly going to try to remember that throughout this new year as I think about the road ahead for all media, old and new.
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Good point, Moonah. Not everything explodes with a hockey stick curve. I was listening to Clay Shirky’s interview on Spark and he noted that it took a long time for the printing press to become the important invention that we know it as today.
Things are lining up nicely. The mobile web is a reality for people now. Kind of like looking at Netscape for the first time after being on compuserve. That alone will bring some exciting developments to on demand content creators and consumers.
Thanks Dave. Shirky actually has one of my favorite quotes on the subject in his last book: “technologies don’t become culturally interesting until they are technologically boring.” Or something along those lines, I’m too lazy to look up the exact quote right now, but you get the idea.
I love your Netscape analogy — you probably remember as I do when there were about 20 different browsers, none of which are around today. Seems like a zillion years ago, but it was less than 10. Fast is relative.
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