Monday, May 22, 2006

Among the audience | Economist.com

Among the audience | Economist.com: "Mr Diller concedes that ?all of the distribution methods get thrown up in the air, and how they land is, well, still up in the air.? Yet Mr Diller is confident that participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry. ?Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,? he says. ?Talent is the new limited resource.?

?What an ignoramus!? says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He advises companies on the uses of new media tools. ?Look around and there's tons of great stuff from rank amateurs,? he says. ?Diller is assuming that there's a finite amount of talent and that he can corner it. He's completely wrong.? Not everything in the ?blogosphere? is poetry, not every audio ?podcast? is a symphony, not every video ?vlog? would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia, the free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica."


I kind of agree with the talent as a finite resource model.

What the second argument fails to take into account is that the rank amateurs do have talent; the ones that become popular beyond their immediate social circle.

The others are only really interesting to their immediate circle of friends; because a pre-existing relationship makes their content valuable to a limited audience.

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