AR&D Reinventing Local Media

This picture of Malia Obama during the middle of her father’s inauguration speech paints a stunning portrait of the disruption to mass media that Steve and I have been writing about for years. Here we have the President’s daughter making her own “movie” of the historic event, capturing the moment from her perspective. Why is she doing this, rather than sitting there with eyes fixed on the podium? Because she can.

We have cited often the report by Nokia in 2007 that by 2012, one-fourth of all entertainment will be created and consumed within peer groups, and this snapshot of yesterday’s event is a telling harbinger of that prediction.

We want to make our own media. We want to capture and share our own events. We want to remember, and the tools for remembering are more powerful than they’ve ever been. We’re a networked culture, and our network is where we connect and share our lives. We’re not looking at the stage anymore, as David Cushman observed last year. We’re looking at each other.

While this event — this blockbuster of an event — brought us all together for at least part of a day, it’s important to acknowledge that our view of such things is shaped by what we’re saying to each other in addition to what the people on TV are saying. This is the leading edge of the personal media revolution, and we’re increasingly seeing the mainstream press working with the people formerly known as the audience to help form the “official” record of the day. This is a good thing, and I think everybody agrees.

Malia Obama’s little video of her father’s speech is like a million other amateur videos of family and friends that form the burgeoning world of personal media. Her event may have been more significant to the masses, but the family picnic, prom, holiday or vacation is just as meaningful to the people who make video records of them. But the capturing of events is a small part of what’s happening today, for it’s the ability we have to share those events — and how they then become a part of the attention of our connections — that is the real disruption of personal media.