We Really Are the Media

I seem to be tracking my fellow classmate Rosie in that I didn’t know I was missing a blog post on the book We the Media by Dan Gilmor. And just as Rosie said, I think it is fortuitous as I think I now have a much better perspective on what the concept means than I did back in January.

Before I read the book, grassroots journalism for me revolved only around the world of bloggers, and really only those that could do it on a full-time basis. But, I’ve come to realize that we all really ARE the media. Every Twitter post I send out or every Flickr image that I upload is media and it tells a story. And it doesn’t matter if it’s read by one or 1,000 people, it still (hopefully) means something to the person reading it and informs then on some level.

As technology and the Internet continue to evolve, our options for adding to the online media world increase. As Gilmor states in his book, “Personal technology wasn’t just about going online. It was about the creation of media in new and, crucially, less expensive ways.” This led to everyone having the capability to contribute. It’s amazing how far we’ve come from the beginning days of the online bulletin boards. I would love to have been online during the start of that, wondering what it was all about. No, I probably wouldn’t have had the insight into the possibilities for the future, but it would have been interesting to have been there from the beginning. I can remember telling my parents in the 7th grade (1995) that we just had to have the Internet. They asked me why, and I think my only answer was that it would help with homework. How little I knew that it would go far beyond that – that it would lead to me writing this post right now.

Personally, I’m glad we have the option to consume all different types of media from any number of sources. This really came across when we looked at international blogs. How often do we get that kind of insight from traditional media?