Adam Tinworth reports from the Le Web 3 conference in Paris. He shares an interesting perspective from one of the speakers, June Cohen:
“We think new media is new,” she said. And it is. “But old media is astonishingly new in the whole of human history.”
Using the clock metaphor for human existence, “old media” appears about two minutes to midnight.
“Before that, all media was social,” she suggests. Without mass media to carry messages, people communicate on an individual or group basis, in the same place as each other. The mass media age has, against expectations, created an anti-social media. Media delivered from on high is new and “frankly, really horrible”. TV has isolated us, Cohen suggested..
“Big media will become smaller,” she concluded.