Post by: Rick Ducey

Chief Strategy Officer, BIA Financial Network

It is an unsettling time to be a journalist. You are either on the edge of extinction or in charge of the universe . . . Access to the Internet gives the generations living today the choice to be the best-informed, or the worst-informed, human beings in history – but we will never be able to claim that we were the least-informed. Celebrity, slime and crude polemics pour from the electronic faucets as easily as high-minded exegeses.Jim Hoagland, WashingtonPost.com, March 2, 2008

There is a certainly duality to the fabric holding together what we tend to call the “digital media.” One fundamental reality is that pretty much all media are digital now, at least for most of their lifecycle. This includes even magazines and newspapers which earn increasing portions of their revenues and readership from digital versions of their products.

The duality I’m speaking of gets closer to what Mr. Hoagland speaks to above. I just came from We Media 2008, an exciting digital media conference held in the multicultural crucible of Miami where the theme was, “Digital worlds: We Media at the tipping point.” Using digital media as the foundation, this conference, in its fourth year, blends generations, cultures, and value systems (e.g., social capital and financial capital) to explore and document the future of digital media. Here at this conference, we had digital immigrants, those who were born in the analog and print era and digital natives, those who have never known a world without personal computers or even by now, the Internet itself.

Digital immigrants sited at We Media included executives from companies like USA Today, UPI, Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, AARP, Miami Herald, Qualcomm, or the Wall Street Journal. Digital natives hailed from both relatively established and start-up companies like Newsgator.com, NewsCup, Real Girls Media, Innovators Network, Imagine Miami or Proteus. Digital immigrants are charged with running companies that must change from within or face extinction. Digital natives are either launching start-ups trying to wrest the keys to the family car from the immigrants, or indeed working inside companies run by immigrants trying to overcome enormous chasms of age, attitude, social norms, culture, behavior, expectations and resources. Think Times Warner versus AOL. Or perhaps better yet, think Google versus the traditional advertising industry as they tried to figure each other out.

Digital immigrants tend to be those in charge of things these days. However, unless they can adapt, the choice is not happy either for them personally or for their companies. On the other hand, digital natives while clearly waiting to receive the keys to the kingdom have not yet achieved ownership of the universe. We Media 2008 put together a very interesting cast of immigrant and native characters from the digital milieu both on the panels and among the attendees making for very interesting “conversations.” (Note: in the Web 2.0 world, speakers and digital media are invitations to become involved in a conversation or interaction, not sterile, one-way, drive-by deliveries of information packages.)

The world the digital natives are about to inherit (wrest) from digital immigrants includes the two worlds Mr. Hoagland sees coexisting. We see both embarrassing riches of information on the one hand and the banal, trivial excesses of the uncritical mind on the other. Without the old guard (FCC, journalistic training and ethics, family values, social mores) holding sway over the popular and vulgar, what chance do digital media run by natives have to make their loftiest contributions to society?

And herein rests the very essence of the duality I noticed at We Media 2008. The digital natives are so bright, creative and fresh-minded about what assumptions to make regarding the role and responsibility of digital media in society. Citizen participatory journalism, social networking, blogging, widgets, gadgets, interactive video, instant messaging and multi-way chat evoke not a shudder or second thought from these natives. This all comes as naturally to them as clicking on the 6pm TV news or the plop of the newspaper at the doorstep might for digital immigrants (neither of which digital natives express much use for).

At BIA Financial Network, we have the great opportunity to work with and learn from companies facing unsettling visions and encouraging opportunities inherent to a digital media world where of extinction versus survival. Ultimately, we see that path to prosperity as led by the optimistic if undisciplined vision of the digital natives who are happy to live by their digital swords if only they could figure out how to get going with their businesses…and that’s where we come in to the picture.

Tags: , AOL, BIA Financial Network, citizen journalism, Digital Media, Google, Jim Hoagland, NewsCup, Newsgator.com, Real Girls Media, Rick Ducey, UPI, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, WashingtonPost, We Media, We Media 2008, Web 2.0

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