The “Audience?” Not Any More.

It’s easy to take Jay Rosen’s eloquence for granted. Don’t. As one of the the most thought-ful (hyphen intended) people I’ve encountered over the last few years, Jay consistently triggers thoughts and conversation that raise the bar for those around him.

Had a great lunch with Jay at Bloggercon over the weekend and just found a link to his piece, “The People Formerly Known As The Audience” in my inbox. In the same vein as Cluetrain (the impact of which the Social Customer Manifesto humbly aspires to achieve a fraction), Jay has nailed his points to the door. A few are reproduced here. Rosen:

“The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

• Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.
• Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.
• Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.
• You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.
• A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not ‘across’ to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.”

While Rosen shines the spotlight on the audiences of media, all of us are catching the reflected glow as participants in every marketplace. The points made above are not restricted to the world of media, or of journalism. They are, instead, another channel marker on a collaborative, generation-long journey where we all get to choose the ports-of-call.