New Media vs. Old Media?

Thanks Pascal for pointing out this interesting video from the Museum of Media History: a polished and graphically impressive retrospective of the major milestones in information construction and diffusion as well as the prediction of its future twists and evolution until a prophetical culmination point in 2014 marking the irrevocable victory of the "New Media" - a decentralized mesh of individual micro-contributions, ratings and content - against the "Old Media" - the Press, Fleet Street and the likes, as depicted in the video by the might of "Googlezon" (Google + Amazon) launching their "Evolving Personalized Information Construct" and the online withdrawal of The New-York Times.

This is good food for thoughts, as I see a strong potential in integrating the multitude of separate and niche nano-publishing and community-based islets that exist today on the Web: think of the synergies that can be created by crossing social relationships (LinkedIn, Friendster, Orkut...), information icosystems (Technorati, Google News, personal RSS subscriptions, e-mails), entertainment (Flickr, Last.FM, Filmtipset in Sweden...), shopping intelligence (Amazon recommendations, ) and many others which I don't know of or not out yet. What stands out is the vast amount of tools and "glue" that have been made available in the last few years to connect content, people, time and location. Far from the Orwellian tone of the video, I thus see such combinations as an opportunity to deepen the meaning and use of the Net, and bring it closer to a collaborative effort.

However, it is important to have the necessary legal (Creative Commons) and privacy frameworks to make such new engine run smoothly. And I seriously doubt that what is seen as the "Old Media" will just let itself wither without reacting, as the video suggests: as already underlined by Loïc, newspapers like Le Monde in France are adopting blogs as a new type of online space, where reader-contributed content has a key role. Soon, I am sure it will expand to other content (photo, video where bandwidth allows) and roles (information, socialization, entertainment...).

Instead of going after the "New vs. Old", we'd rather look at the "Aggregated vs. Isolated" in the media world.