The question I have been asked every day since I started grade school: what do I want to DO when I grow up?
One would think that after being in school for the majority of my life, changing my undergrad major three times, and moving to a new city to pursue a master’s in a very specific subject, that I would have a pretty good idea about what I want to do in life… but I have no idea.
This is not because I don’t have strong interests or want to contribute to society. Instead, I am trying to figure out which of the new media crazes really will stick. Should I really spend $10,000 in tuition on classes about Twitter if it will be a non-existent tool in a year or so?
Technology is developing faster than we can analyze it. And often times, social media tools end up being used the most for entirely different reasons than they were intended. Twitter is a perfect example of a business tool turned insta-news ticker fueled by the groundswell. I think that although we cannot always predict what will emerge in the future, we do know that our society expects and demands much more from media, professional or social.
An article from TechCrunch explained that users of sites like Twitter and Facebook are in a constant pursuit of “now” and that these sites are “conditioning us to expect information as it happens, whether it’s accurate or developing.” Because of this new attitude, traditional news media cannot keep up and are failing at their attempts (and opportunities) to integrate social media. But even though I fully participate in the destroying of old media, I think that newspapers and journalists have an obligation to stay traditional!
The TechCrunch article, by Brian Solis, goes on to explain that social media sites are huge communities with massive amounts of noise, which is only useful if the noise can be filtered. Sites like Facebook and Twitter act like a pebble being thrown into a lake – they create ripples (some bigger than others) which alert the mainstream media which stories need to be fully covered and verified. Social media is convenient to break the news, but we still trust a journalist’s moral code for the facts.
So where do I come into the picture? Like I said above, I don’t know… but what I do know is that now more than ever people have felt the need to communicate – with people they know, about things they know, and about things they think they should know. I want to make sure this continues to happen. Whether I am fighting for net neutrality, filming how-to videos for flip cameras, or writing blogs like this fellow MCDM’er on having a tech-friendly wedding, I still feel that I am doing my little part to push forward. I am just resistant to overly invest myself in one trend or technology because the lifespans of emerging media continue to shrink…
jen's thoughts 