The Masses Are the Media

A long time ago, in a media landscape far, far away, there was a theory.

The theory was a marketer’s dream. It was even given its own marketing-style nicknames like The Magic Bullet Theory and The Hypodermic Needle Model.

According to the theory, communicating with an audience worked something like this: You load up your ammo, you aimed (sort of), and you shot.

Everyone who received the message took interpreted it in a similar way. The media’s pill was the only pill to swallow. 

In a world of rudimentary diagrams, communications looked something like this:

But people came to realize that it didn’t work like that. Sure, people all saw the same messages, but they had different meanings. People may have listened, but what they heard could be very different.

The marketer’s dream was over.

But, being clever, they realized they still had the power. They realized they might not be able to tell their audiences what to think, but they could set the agenda for what the audience thought about.

All was not lost in the marketing world. By framing the mindset of the populace, there was still at least some control for the marketers on the range of conversation.

In a world where quality graphics were banned, it looked something like this:

But, over time, technology allowed recipients to create frames of their own, and turned them into senders. They created and passed along their own thoughts to their own networks and beyond. The media landscape got more cluttered. More voices were being heard. It got harder and harder to stand out.

And the marketer’s dream turned to a nightmare.

Not only were people indifferent to the messages, but they were having their own discussions. They were setting their own agenda.

More distance was put between the original sender and the final recipient. Sometimes the two never even connected. And after being sifted and filtered, the original message was almost always altered.

The theory of the magic bullet turned out to be a myth. It turns out, the masses are the media.

The masses are no longer just consuming media, they are organizing it, evaluating it publicly, sharing it with their friends, and changing the current of conversation.
There is a whole new population of people framing content. And their agenda is the one that matters.

Are they friends of yours?

[image: james cridland]