Why I may never use the phrase “new media” again
What I don’t know is almost everything, I admit, and that everything is mushrooming in size daily. But today I did add a fascinatingly useful new term to my vocabulary by learning the meaning of the word grok. (Hint — it’s a verb and it’s actually been around since 1961).
I came across the word in a post on GigaOM last Friday by the site’s founder Om Malik. Titled “There is No New Media: It’s All New Consumption,” the post is a bit of a two-by-four aimed at the thickish, oldish heads running most of traditional media.
Excerpt:
“For the media industry (which is video, music and print), there has been one more, and perhaps the farthest-reaching, failure: the inability of the folks to grok that today’s audience is not tomorrow’s audience. It goes without saying there’s a whole generation of folk that has either grown up, or are growing up, on the Internet. Their consumption and online behavior is going to be predicated on a distribution medium whose basic premise is abundance. They will find, curate and consume on their own terms, on their own choice of screens and on their own time.”
Clarifying phrase, isn’t it — online behavior is going to be predicated on a distribution medium whose basic premise is abundance.
Highly recommended reading if you want some insight into a big picture perspective of media consumption trends. And if you aren’t familiar with another phrase — Generation D — it’s a chance to remedy that also. See the full post here.
