How Not to Think About New Media - July 23, 2008
Here are two examples of exactly how NOT to think about new media:
Violet Blue files restraining order on Wikipedia Vandal
BlueCollarorDie.com Goes out Business (with a staff of 15 people)
If you take Tyler Cowen's parking ticket parable totally of context, it makes sense here. He said that government diplomats (when they had blanket immunity) from countries with illegitimate governments received exponentially more parking violations than their colleagues from democracies and republics. The thinking is that if you got your position from somebody who killed their predecessor, you don't really have all that much respect for "the rules."
All this is pretty typical for how people think (and fail) online: They don't legitimize "context creators" enough to bother learning how they work. Stuck in a distribution paradigm, they assume the burden of discovery is on the customer. Lastly, they can't keep overhead low enough to compete with people who do it for fun. Why? Because their whole careers have been about exploiting distribution monopolies and exclusive access to the press.
That's exactly how NOT to think about new media. Regardless of how you go where you are (or how you plan on getting there), the people that made "the rules" now have an enormous amount of influence. And you don't have any leverage over them. Wikipedia is the number 1 place for finding information about bands, above Myspace and their own homepages. You better fucking learn the rules.
BlueCollar didn't do it. "What could be so hard about making a website?" So they hired 15 people, filled it with the stuff not good enough for TV and figured people would like it. To their credit, that's a working strategy in the rest of the entertainment industry. When distribution is a limited, 90% of success to getting distributed. But it's like they didn't even both to realize that NO OTHER site has that kind of payroll. It's actually even more embarrassing for Violent Blue. She doesn't have a generation of tradition to hide behind.
It's way easier to figure out the rules and their loopholes than to get mad and act like your above them. That's what Seth was saying, the web doesn't care.
The wrong way to think about new media is "how can I get it to do what I want?" The right way, just like Alinsky was saying, is to think "How can I work within the system to accomplish what I want to accomplish?"
That gives you one crucial task: Figure out how the system works.
Posted by ryanholiday at 1:13 PM
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"That gives you one crucial task: Figure out how the system works."
So for someone that doesn't really know how the system works but is ready and willing to learn, where do you recommend they begin? Any books or articles? Or is this something that can only be learned by doing, which makes it impossible for any one person or group to explain how this or that aspect of the new media "works"? I'm eager to figure it out, but if you just say "you have internet, you are interested, get out there and immerse yourself in it" then I'm afraid I have no idea where to begin.
Posted by: Ryan at July 23, 2008 12:32 PM
Dude, c'mon. For like two years now I've been passing along everything that I've learned in real time, as I am learning it. Plus I have a book list filled with like 15 books to begin with.
I'll do more but there's more than enough out there already to start.
Posted by: Ryan Holiday at July 23, 2008 01:43 PM
The quote from the PR release on BlueCollarOrDie's death is interesting:
"I used to think it daunting to succeed in television, but compared to the Internet, where's there's millions of sites, how do you attract an audience?" he said. "And when you do, how do you monetize? It's so crowded it's impossible to stand out."
I haven't figured out the system entirely but I know that it rewards honesty and value. It's actually easy to 'stand out' if you give someone something that they didn't know they needed.
Posted by: Chris at July 24, 2008 07:44 AM
I see a lot of this as going back to keys you have identified in the past... approaching New Media not just trying to figure out how to work the system, and really, even more than learning how the system operates. Rather, work to find what you can do FOR the system, be it adding to the collective information pool of Wikipedia, freely offering insight and expertise, or even just trying to produce innovative ideas, rather than always only consuming.
I don't think you can learn the system without getting your hands dirty.
Posted by: Glenn at July 25, 2008 10:44 AM
