Understanding the Medium

His Girl Friday (1940) stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. The movie is an adaption of Ben Hecht’s play The Front Page.

(If you think you’re working hard enough, look at the amount of work he produced in his lifetime.)

I enjoyed this movie for its fast dialog although it lacks any real tension or depth.

What caught my attention was the obvious fact that the movie is a filmed play. It’s set in a number of very staged scenes with most of the action taking place in a very restricted area. The film has to be carried on its dialog, like a play, because there is really very little else there.

It struck me that there is an analogy between the early days of the movie and the early days of the Internet. Compare this movie to The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), a movie that has intense tension, amazingly rapid pace, intense emotional highs and lows, and yet almost no dialog at all.

The movie has moved on to a place where it can really exploit the art form to create an exciting experience for the audience.

Perhaps the Internet today is still what the movie was in 1940. Information on the Web is still essentially newpapers, documents and television online. Just as His Girl Friday is a play on celluloid. What will we unleash on the Internet when we really understand how to use it? And how many years will we have to wait to know?

I Million Friends

A line in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald caught my attention. In a harassment court case a Mr Hurst, accused of hounding a woman by sending her a friend invitation in Facebook, suggested Facebook friends are not that same as real world friends.

""[Popular British radio DJ Chris Moyles] has 1 million Facebook friends. Do you think he knows them all intimately?" Mr Hurst said.

Hurst was later cleared of any crime involving Facebook, but advised to leave the woman alone.

The case left a couple of questions unanswered. Does Moyles really have a million Facebook friends? If so, is his Facebook page more important than his Web site?

The first question is easy to answer. BBC 1's Chris Moyles Show page in Facebook currently has 334,860 fans. I imagine the number of unique visitors that cross Moyles' BBC pages each month is higher than that.

But looking at the pages both on Facebook and the BBC's site, it's interesting to note that there's something missing there that I'm sure is critical to the radio show: Chris Moyles.

Both the Facebook and BBC pages have discussion boards for users. But Moyle's personality doesn't shine through the pages. What's he thinking today? Where are his tweets? Where are his posts in the discussions? Did I miss something?

As a radio show I've no doubt that Moyles and the crew are focused on radio. But I can't help thinking 334,860 fans merit a little attention too. They're not just listening to the radio. They want to be seen to be associated with the Moyles show. And they are creating conversation around the show. In addition to the fans' posts on the Moyles Show page, Facebookies have created another 365 Chris Moyles groups.

Radio shows might do well to think about Facebook as a new antenna.

Stern Action

The Washington Post writes: NPR Leader Out After Board Clash, Ken Stern's New Media Forays Rankled Public Radio Affiliates.

See comments from Jeff Jarvis on the resignation of Ken Stern.

Also Dennis Haarsager on the NewsGang podcast with Steve Gilmore.

And in his own blog.

Oh dude. Not news...

Dan Kennedy, a professor and Northeastern, who writes the MediaNation blog, has an article in the Commonwealth magazine entitled "Plugged in, tuned out".

He quotes research that says though young people are saturated in media, they shy away from news. "16 percent of young adults (ages 18 to 30) read a newspaper every day, compared with 35 percent of those older than 30."

Kennedy says young people's lack of interest in news and resulting shallow knowledge of current affairs represents a threat both to news media and to civic life.

The article explores the reasons for this phenomenon: a) because Americans are marrying, having children and buying homes later in life, and b) because they are used to well designed and easy to use cell phones and other media tools that make newspapers look positively nineteenth century. (Kennedy was on a panel in Boston to discuss this article shortly after it was published. During the discussion one of the panel members raised the additional idea that Americans today see themselves primarily as consumers. A change from a time when Americans saw themselves firstly as citizens.)

Kennedy looks at efforts regional media have made to fight this trend: a) addressing subjects that interest young people, b) looking for local angles on foreign stories, c) making absorbing online interactive content, and d) creating Web 2.0 news products.

Kennedy suggests the Blue Mass. Group, BostonNow, Digg, Reddit and NewsTrust could be hints of what the future of news might look like in a Web 2.0 world, pointing out that young people who've grown up with MySpace and Facebook are accustomed to participating and creating content.

In social media, says Kennedy, the members are accustomed to setting the agenda and its possible they will do this increasingly as they interact with news organizations. "A type of participatory news that could evolve into an example of civic engagement in and of itself."

(Link: Click here to read the article.)