Darren Rowse, and Jeremy Wright recently celebrated B5Media’s 6 Month Birthday. Businesses are all relatively new at the six month stage. But conversations and relationships are all starting to gel. One of the things that was especially profound about this was something Darren referenced he called them ‘campfires’.
A friend recently reminded me that throughout all history people have clustered together to have conversations. Over the ages a lot of these conversations happened at the end of the day around a campfire where extended families would come together to tell stories, debate issues that impacted them and to entertain each other.
Over the centuries the locations of where these conversations took place changed with in more recent history us moving towards methods of communication that relied upon paid centralised experts to inform and entertain us.
With the advent of new media, like blogging, we’re seeing a move back to the days of people informing and entertaining themselves. In a sense what I see b5 (and other blog and podcast networks) doing is creating spaces for these conversations to happen.
It gives me a great deal of joy to see 100 small (but growing) campfires glowing in the b5 landscape and to witness the growing numbers of people gathering around them to learn, build community and converse.
This is truly what new media,social networking, and really largely what Web 2.0 is all about. It’s about creating conversations. Every blog network, social networking site,podcasting network, vlog out there is lighting fires and asking people to join them in the conversation. This is why it’s just so silly to sit around and fight because occasionally you want to go sit around someone else’s campfire. The more campfires we have the better. It’s about distributed media, not monopolized conversation.
The Old Media is scared of conversation. Mostly because they are so used to being the only one that gets to talk. Kevin Anderson from another campfire group Corante recently touched on this point very well. He is referring to new media, interactive media when he says:
They feel a sense of ownership with their media, but not with the stuff they dismissively call the MSM (the Mainstream Media).
I think Kevin hit the nail squarely with that swing.
Originally posted on March 26, 2006 @ 12:29 pm