Remember Clay Shirky, who said that media become really relevant when they become so common and boring that nobody even realizes anymore that we use them so much?
I had such an experience tonight. I do realize I am using new media a lot, being a journalist, but I think this is the way things will develop.
So what happened? I checked my email, and found a mail from Aliza Sherman, which I got via the Pownce social network, warning me that there was a live show (Real Biz) on slcn.tv about Dell in Second Life. I went to have a look and saw indeed, from a respectful distance, the interview in full action.
So what happens is that a sequence of media was involved – social network, old-fashioned but effective email, website, video on website, live streaming video and a virtual world (and this blog). And it is considered normal, we hardly notice it anymore.
Those who seem to have stopped noticing are young people and kids immersed in virtual worlds, at least that is what I have been told my some media experts. They meet people in a space, which might be a virtual hangout, or a physical one, but they don’t refer to it anymore as “going into a virtual space”. Like we say “I will google it” and not “I will now go on the Internet and go to a search engine called Google to search databases.”
But being an elderly journalist, I still find it fascinating enough to blog about odd sequences from pownce to Second Life.
Roland Legrand