The Age of Participation Means New Ideas

That’s what The Economist called it — The Age of Participation. Companies, enterprises, organizations, associations, clubs, kids, commediennes are blogging, podcasting, uploading videos onto the Internet.

The way that people interact with the Internet is changing. No longer do we go there just to take, take, take from a chosen few. Millions of us are creating content.

The infrastructure was not built for this scenario. The Internet pipelines were expected to work one way, to mimic the way we use television — information comes to us in a one-way stream. This explains why your attempts to upload content take longer than those to download do. Those who own the Internet pipelines could not see a reason that folks might be putting things ON the Internet in amazing numbers.

The Economist says

Exactly this, however, is starting to happen. Last November, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 57 percent of American teenagers create content for the internet — from text to pictures, music and video.

“In this new-media culture,” says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California, “people no longer passively ‘consume’ media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in whatever form and on whatever scale.”

“This does not have to mean that ‘people write their own newspaper’, says Jeremy Zawodny , a prominent blogger and software engineer at Yahoo!, an internet portal. “It could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie they saw or as sophisticated as shooting a home video.”

Unfortunately media business models are built around large PASSIVE AUDIENCES aren’t they?

This opens a whole new world for entrepreneurs and small business to take their place, set up shop on the Internet, and that’s what they have indeed been doing — forming communities, talking to and teaching each other. The Internet has become a phenomenal exhange of ideas, conversation, and relationships. Something the folks of the old media had not considered. It’s a bit evolution and a bit revolution.

But really it’s neither of those. It’s the participation, the conversation, the me and you, that makes the new Internet communities work, that invites the kids to upload content, that has people giving back rather than just taking.

I think that is a very good thing. Conversation and participation often leads to innovation and outstanding new ideas.

To be passive is to watch the world move away from you.

Liz Strauss