Dean Takahash at Venture Beat shared with us a summary of a recent Deloitte survey on the state of media. The report concludes that, “We’re living in a media democracy, where no single form of media dominates the attention of Americans. It’s also an age where everyone contributes to the media, not just traditional media companies.” The last part is old news but I find the first part more interesting. 

There has been discussion about whether blogging will continue in the age of Twitter.  I have mentioned, as have others, that they have different functions and complement each other.  Twitter may take away a few of the functions of blogs but there are many left that cannot be handled by Twitter.

There has been very few times where a new media actually completely replaces an old one. Each new advance in communication technology expands the possibilities for knowledge capture and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the requirements to enable them. Take text or writing for example: the invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.

In the pre-writing oral tradition, the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic. To promote memory, instruction and knowledge preservation made use of verbal and musical rhythms; however, these rhythms placed severe limits on the verbal arrangement of what was said, as in Homer, and the need to memorize used up cognitive energy that otherwise could have been devoted to learning. Because of the heavy memory load, the epic poets did not actually memorize content verbatim; they created new versions from a set of possibilities as they went along.

The concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science and essential for many forms of instruction. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. Greek thought changed and such works as Plato’s “Republic” are described by some scholars as an attack on the oral poetic tradition of knowledge distribution (see Eric Havelock’s “Origins of Western Literacy” or his better known “Preface to Plato”).

However, the invention of text did not replace poetry, it just reduced the content it covered to what was more appropriate for the media. I think the same thing will happen with Twitter and blogs.

Each medium had its strengths and limitations. It was not until the development of papyrus that real literary and academic works could easily be recorded and transported. This technology was used by the Greeks and Romans from the 5th century BC until the 8th or 9th century AD. Papyrus was superseded by parchment beginning in the 4th century AD. Both of these new media were easier to store and transport than the clay tablets but they were also more susceptible to the fire of invading armies. The ease of copying and movement to other locations preserved more work on paper but perhaps many more original stone tablets still exist. Digital media has many advances over paper until your hard drive crashes with no backup.

 Returning to the present, the Deloitte study, Ed Moran, director of product innovation at Deloitte Services said, “A lot of media will coexist…We won’t see a massive extinction.” Looking across all generations, television remains the most influential ad medium for 88 percent of respondents. Magazines (49 percent) and online (48 percent) tied for second. Radio remained influential for 27 percent of the respondents. Only 5 percent — mostly millennials — considered cell phone ads to be the most influential. Roughly 70 percent of all consumers are watching user-generated videos. YouTube is no longer just a fad.  Google must be pleased with their purchase.

In my informal survey of two very plugged in Generation Xers (early 30s), they had only vaguely heard of Twitter, but were very heavy users of Facebook, text messaging, iTunes, laptops, and email.  I had to explain Twitter to them in the context of these other tools.  The rest of the survey is interesting. My main objection is the discovery that I am no longer considered a Boomer. This survey graduated me to the “matures” category.  Well, bl*ep them, I was born post WW2 and still have a lot of immaturity left.