So what does “mediavorous” mean anyway?
We — and by we I mean anybody within easy reach of the internet, television, cell phones, movie theaters, books, magazines, newspapers, flyers taped to lamp posts — live surrounded by more story, more narrative, than any previous era since the first amphibian crawled out of the surf and started thinking about how to tell the tale of its triumphant arrival on sand to the second amphibian who was still floating the water.
This blog has a simple thesis: we are what we read, listen to, watch and (in different ways that I’ll be exploring) create. The explosive growth of media across all channels parallels an increase in our appetite for stories of all sorts. Deer are herbivorous; lions are carnivorous. When it comes to our diets people are omnivorous, but when it comes to our minds we are mediavorous. We are surrounded by more, more, evermore things to watch, hear, read and write, and since we are spending more of our time on these stories, that increased consumption is changing us.
They’re not all junk food, these stories we consume. It would be easy but inaccurate to draw scary dotted lines between the epidemic in American obesity, particularly among children, and the collective weight gain in media and how much of it we eat daily.
I don’t think the changes in how we use media — and how that changes us — are bad, but I do think we need to spend more time thinking about them.
In the last two decades, story has seeped into every available crevice of our lives. A few years back, I didn’t have to watch a thirty second commercial on the drive-thru ATM before I was allowed to get my money. This morning, I walked into the pharmacy down the street and walked past posters for the new James Woods TV drama “Shark” attached to the shoplifting detectors at the front door– also new. Much of the thunderstorm of new story coming at us comes from marketing, and in my day job as the head of content at iMedia Communications I track how marketing is changing in the face of interactive media.
But marketing is only one significantly increased source of story. We also have new cable channels on the television and new radio channels beaming down from satellites, blogs, podcasts, vidcasts, social media, the creative commons and fan fiction across all channels. Even better, we now have more control over when and where we experience this media, although I hasten to add that having more control means having to make more decisions, which can be a drag.
I take my new Treo 700p smart phone with me everywhere, and on a business trip this week I watched the season finale of TNT’s “The Closer” on the Treo as my plane winged its way to our iMedia Summit in Las Vegas. I had ripped the show from my TiVo across my home network into my desktop computer, which then compressed the show into tiny, Treo-screen sized format. It was fantastic: I watched something I truly wanted to see and got to relax for a few precious minutes as I was gearing myself up for a very busy business trip.
However, I didn’t talk to the person in the seat next to me, didn’t paw through the Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine, didn’t gaze out the window and therefore didn’t learn anything new about the world.
Consuming stories collectively — on a screen, on a stage, from a speaker somewhere — is one way that we connect with each other. Right now, two different vectors of force are changing that collective experience: on one hand, the anatomization of media (reducing CDs to individual songs on iTunes, TV shows to video clips on YouTube) and increased control of when and where we see media bits leads to increased isolation. On the other hand, we can connect with each other in so many new ways — email, social networks, websites, instant messages, cell phone SMS — and we are so inundated with media that isolation is more requently a choice, an assertion we must make, than an unwelcome reality. Our online communities are not passively waiting a click away: frequently they shout, jump up and down, waving for our attention… even if we’re doing something important.
I’ve spent the better part of my professional life thinking and writing about how stories work and what audiences do with stories. Right now, both the stories and the audiences are changing. That’s what this blog is about.
We are mediavorous.
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