This week I saw a review of a book entitled ‘1000 places to see before you die’.It’s part of a popular series where everything from travel destinations, to CDs and TV shows are reviewed and rated in a format so you can find the ‘best of everything’.
I used to look at these books with a sense of, well, inadequacy. I’d worry there was so much I didn’t know, so much to keep up with. I’d flick through them not to find something new or enlightening, but to re-assure myself that I’d already seen a few, mentally ticking them off the list.
A vein attempt, literally, to feel a better about keeping up with the right places, the right books, the right art. Someone else’s ideas about the right stuff of course, but if it’s in print, it must have some authority.
Not any more. The new digital and user media landscape has changed all that.
Nowadays with customer communities and user reviews these lists seem archaic, and somewhat absurd. It’s not that there is never a need for good critics, but a lot of what is contained in these official lists is simply not for us. How can it be? To cover all audiences, they try to cover every market and every taste. But in trying to please everybody, they please no one in particular.
In many ways these lists symbolize the state of traditional media and marketing now. One message for everyone, one authority on how things are, one mass media to reach its audience.
This has been replaced by customers as critics, crowd sourcing of content, and the transfer of media power over to you and me.
As Michael Hirschorn highlighted in the Pleasure Principle, in order to deal with these changes media “needs stop thinking they are important, and start being interesting”. And that doesn’t just go for newspapers.
You only need to see what’s going on with Iran this week – how average Iranians used Twitter and message boards to trump the so called ‘official’ media like CNN - to let the world know what was really going on. Check out Clay Shirky in this great video for a fascinating reality check on what’s really going on with the media landscape now.
And so it goes for anyone in the communication business. People no longer have to rely on the idea that someone else knows what is right or interesting for me – I can explore what is right for me.
Of course this change is a threat to the established order. A threat to products or brands or people who still believe they are in control.
Some of those people, like Andrew Keen in Cult of the Amateur: How’s today’s internet is killing our culture - would argue that what this leads to is “a mass of trivia and banality, where no content has any more intrinsic value than anything else".
When every amateur’s viewpoint becomes as important as experts in the field he argues, how can that lead to the betterment of our culture?
Sorry, but I don’t think Andrew gets it.
Look at Rotten Tomatoes or at Digg. On these popular sites people are seeking out the opinions and insights that are important for them, amateur or otherwise. Often getting both views in the same place. Only here the choice is ours about who we want to believe.
The power of editing and reporting cultural relevance – whether that’s music, media or advertising - has shifted forever, and that is a massive change. We are only just living through the early days of this now.
The keepers of the ‘one true message’ - the definitive lists written on tablets and brought down from the mount – their days are over. Dude.
What matters now is context and relevance. Sometimes I want to know what other punters think, and sometimes it’s what critics I respect think. Often it’s both. Either way, what the web has exposed is the myth that there is only one idea of what is best in our culture, on our screens, in our lives.
And as a result, and maybe more importantly, allowed people to participate in culture in ways they could never have imagined.
