At some point in your life, you have probably been told (or figured out for yourself) not to believe everything you read in the newspaper or see on TV. (My apologies to the Enquirer, the Post and, um, my employer and its colleagues.) Remember how your school librarian, English teacher or journalism teacher sternly warned you to find at least two and preferably three sources for your research on a subject? They may not have known about YouTube, but they knew what is still true: people have their own perspective on subjects, and you need to examine several viewpoints or sources to find which parts are objective and which parts are subjective (or outright garbage).
I have read several opinion pieces lately about how access to information (with a loose definition of information) is confusing the consumer, getting in the way of decision-making. The most recent was a newspaper column last week on a video of John Edwards primping, mashed up with the song “I Feel Pretty” (which, I must say, was chucklicious). To paraphrase: Oh my goodness, didn’t he understand that cameras were running and soon his image would be everywhere? Now everyone thinks he’s vain and no one will take him seriously.
Or … maybe everyone realizes that you do things unconsciously when you don’t realize you’re being watched and it will be repeated over and over and over again until you want to crawl under a rock. Didn’t the columnist ever go to high school? Maybe she was lucky and skipped from childhood to adulthood. Good for her.
Communications is an exciting field right now. Consumers have become participants. Now it’s not a matter of writing letters to the editor until you hit the right note and get published. No, just post your blog or your video for the world to see and build your own audience. Consumers are now not only participants; they are competition for traditional media.
But I don’t think the majority of us are confused about what we’re seeing. We can weed out the informative from the entertaining. I do not base my voting decisions or other important decisions on a viral video. Do you? –Patsy
