TechWag

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Sometimes the most interesting conversations are the ones you simply sit back and listen to. Overheard last night while I was at a meeting was the idea that we are the media now, with all its faults and promises, that individuals across many different viewpoints and biases are simply becoming the new reality TV across the internet.

What home town paper can compete for lurid detail in a news paper article like the public meltdown of a family in a divorce that is played across the internet? For all its prurient amusement, the internet provides a much richer resource for following the divorce and all its lurid details than the one column blurb in a news paper.

The public flame out when someone uses a scorched earth process of quitting a job, or the public dissolution of a company like Blognation. This is much more compelling and more real in the longer run than anything we can read in a paper, even the weekly world news with batboy. We love batboy but we know he is fake, on the internet when dealing with people who are publicly flaming out, we know this is real, and in some ways much more entertaining than anything we will see on reality TV.

In some ways we are more like hyper real TV rather than the media, we put things out on the internet that used to be “private family matters” and we find support groups for those issues. From suicide clubs to just about anything else, if you think something you can find a support group for it online. These support groups talk to each other, share best practices, and provide a wealth of information that we will never find in any other context. It is highly doubtful that the local home town paper will cover the nuances of a suicide club outside of the immediate headline to appeal to people to purchase the paper. We won’t buy the paper, but we will go “Google it” to learn more once we know of its existence.

We are the media also brought us closer to companies, and the people who live and work inside them. Want to find out about something from Cisco, Microsoft, Google, HP, Jet Blue, Comcast, or any other company, you can go read their blog and find out what it is like on the inside. You can talk to an insider and get an opinion (biased or not) on something. The old corporate walled garden broken because we have instant access to people on the inside who will talk to us. Corporate dramas played out on the internet also provide a reality TV look and feel to those of us who want to know or follow the story.

We are the media, we are hyper real reality TV, and we started posting information about our lives in the good old homestead days, and moved on to blogs, video and podcasting. We might have small audiences, we might meet trolls, but we also find a lot of support in ways that the home town paper or even the national papers would not touch at all.

So why is “We are the Media” so downright interesting?

For some it is support and comfort, or others amusement and derision. The motivation of “we are the media” is not important; the important part is that we are in many cases airing our “dirty laundry” out on the internet in ways that the newspapers, tabloids, and others will not touch unless you are a celebrity with name recognition. Since most of us though are not celeb’s, it is sometimes comforting to know your neighbor screwed up and they self posted (or their friends posted, or their significant other posted, or someone else broke the news) the issues that they are going through.

We are the media, for some this might be a cause to worry, for others it is just another example of being transparent. In the longer run this will alter the society that we live in, and what our personal relations look like as we “tell all” on line.