Good term: The People Formerly Known as the Audience

There’s a great opinion piece on The Huffington Post today about a mind-shift needed about the former roles of information providers and the "audience." Essentially, the author, Jay Rosen, spells-out why that’s over.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people
of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform
shift you’ve all heard about.

It’s mainly about the web vs mass media and it’s an almost gloating description of how the-worm-has-turned. But there’s one paragraph that suggests that other kinds of institutions–not just ol’ MSM–should give this some thought.

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.

Yeah, I think this applies to cancer-patients and cancer-concerned communities. It’s now about the horizontal flow.

Correction: I see that these comments are not Jay Rosen’s but were sent to him by someone not identified by name. Still…it speaks for me. Oh, and there’s this opinion in WIRED called "People Power."

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  1. Thanks for sharing – I had not seen the Huffington Post before!! Love the Eat the Press section!!

  2. Yeah, there’s one thing the left and right have in common: they’re not happy with MSM.

  3. Greetings — I was so happy to learn about this blog through David Collin’s profile on NetSquared. I’m (among many other things), someone who’s been living with metastatic breast cancer for almost 5 years. I’ve been an active member of online patient communities for almost as long, and have done a lot of thinking about how both new technologies, and the horizontal “power of the patients” can be used far more than they are today. I actually moderated a remote session during the NetSquared conference. Transcript is posted at: http://www.netsquared.org/judith-feder
    I would love the opportunity to learn more about what the FI group is doing, and share some of my thoughts and research. I had an opportunity to survey one of the lists I belong to (bcmets.org), and I think I’ve got a good perspective on what patients want and need from online communities.

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