A long long time ago, in 1996, I read an article in the Wall St. Journal entitled “The Case of the Vanishing Medium: Perpetrator is Large”.  It was all about how medium was no longer marketed to consuming Americans, and had instead been replaced with large, extra-large, super-size, grande and big gulp.  It was an article about the ever expansion of capitalism, the fattening of America and the constant pursuit of growth and profits, phasing out that darling of the ’70s, medium.  The idea of medium had become obsolete as a means unto itself, it was just a signpost on a road on the way to large.

There was recently a ditty passed around the net called “The Year the Media Died”, which is kind of funny, as in “many-a-truth-is-said-in-jest” funny.  And somehow this strikes a chord as to how and why this is all happening and why it’s really true and there’s nothing that can be done.  The media is now the vanishing medium.  Once “The” media was the only way to get information from one point to another.  Collectively, it was a point of control.   Physical and monetary capital was once required to access people.  Presses, and ink, and trucks, and editors, and skyscrapers.  But now, it appears, the invisible hand and its legerdemains have shifted information exchange to social networks.  Experts exist; they are deemed experts by reactions of infinite arrays of influence circles, rather than an editor in Times Square, and they publish at zero cost.   All that is needed now, citing Howard Lindzon, is “social” capital.  And this time it wasn’t the messenger that was shot, for bloggers and professors, like Clay Shirky, are going strong; it was the message, it died, somewhere between the news room and our doorsteps.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry when Wolf Blitzer goes to check what’s on Twitter as an activity of delivering the news.  ”It’s the greatest thing since the invention of the printing press” has lost its panache, and perhaps our typical “greatest thing since” expression will very well revert back to sliced bread.  

Here’s a well-put paragraph from a Tim O’Reilly blog post about where the web is going:

The Web is no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an “information shadow,” an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications.

It can be awe-inspiring to watch an old model die as a new one comes to life.  The past 9-10 months (September 08 to now) have brought both the banking system and the media face-to-face with a juggernaut.  Much of what we’d seen in our recent lifetimes of business models had been the same.  Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches.  The banking industry and the media were often no more than a collection of Sylvester McMonkey McBeans simply taking a generic product, figuring out who next to sell it to, and repackaging it for sale.  But Dr. Seuss’s satirical scribblings were more poignant than he was probably thinking at the time.  The children’s book that comes to mind that I might metaphorically invoke is Eric Carle’s The Tiny Seed (my son Owen’s favorite book).  In this book, a tiny seed becomes a giant, most beautiful, flower.  But autumn comes, and the petals are blown off the flower, and the seed pod opens, scattering many tiny seeds into the wind.  

Old media has been one of the earliest adopters of new media.  How great for an article or a blog piece to be propagated and retweeted by its constituents.  But the pupil has overcome the master, as the value of a piece, or an opinion, is determined by its reception in social media.  Information now trades in a free market, no longer requiring a physical capital-rich medium of experts to relay its importance.

Little exhibits this more significantly than the way social media has impacted the building revolution in Iran.   That thousands of individual citizens in #Iran can protest an election, photograph an injustice, film a murder, type a micro-blog message, pass a link, ping those links through an underground network of proxies, to bypass a government, so that they arrive on individual laptops almost anywhere, next to a grande latte, where these streams of messages can then be considered by each reader on his or her own, then aired, and discussed, and what happens is that all of those people together respond.  And all of these separate actions can, and do, create a revolution.  

Would the media’s medium have done such a thing?  It is hard to imagine that we could ever go back to the time when we were able to trust the medium.  Perpetrator is large.