Threads, in theory is a social network but in practice it is a popularity contest driven by algorithms. Normal people are competing against influencers to be seen. You are more likely to find a troll than someone interested in what you have to write, or what you think.
More often than not you will see posts with 21,000 followers, a thousand comments, and several thousand likes. When a post does get 5000 views you will get very little conversation.
I like that I can watch days of television series and that I can’t spend 90 minutes watching films. Television series are about people, places and situations and the characters are realistic. In contrast films are superficial, shallow and too full of special effects for a story to be told. The cinema loses out because it is too superficial, too pretentious without offering something contrast at the end of the donated time.
This Week in Media 85 is an interesting conversation about media news for the past week with a technological slant. This week’s interesting is particularly interesting as it explored the future of television and how people consume media. From the PVR and the ability for people to discuss the content they enjoy to machines that talk to each other they cover many topics. They also discussed computer literacy and whether the youth of today are as computer litterate as previous generations.
Forget the term new media, it’s passed, it’s gone. Today’s key word is social media. What this term means is the following. Any medium that encourages conversations via new technologies, whether twitter, blogs and podcasts or forums is a social media. It is the idea that authority has disappeared. Rather than be talked to by the content producers a dialogue is formed. Liana Lehua of Girls gone geek.tv for example started following me just as I was listening to her talk on another podcast than your own.
When I started using comptuers they were nothing more than ega displays with the large floppy disks and games were text based. As I grew older so the games grew to be more complex, from 2d to 3d and then the quality improved. The television of my youth was limited to five channels and by the 90’s had expanded to twenty plus channels. By 2000 the number had exploded to several hundred channels and that’s just counting the English ones.
My week started at 10 this morning and was over by 1300 this afternoon. It was a lecture and a seminar about Brian Winston and social determinism in relation to the media. It’s a theory which is exploring whether social factors affect the technology that we use. I was taking notes during that lecture but not with pen and paper and without a laptop. Instead I was using the O2 XDA minis.
Over the next two weeks, I am working in part of what will become part of the new media landscape. I receive footage via satellite and edit short summaries to become video clips on the official site of the organisation. At the moment it’s not visible to the normal public but it is an interesting activity. As part of my dissertation, I have to understand where the documentary has come from and where it’s going.