As a member of the forty-something crowd, on the cusp of middle-age, I can say that I have seen a great many changes in the world. For example, I remember the decline and eventual death of the 8-Track cassette with the popular advent of Compact Cassettes and Compact Discs. I also remember the arrival of cable TV. Our neighbors were the first people I knew who had ON TV (along with a big, strange box they needed to access it). The first computer in my house was some variety of an Apple II that did not go “online”. The Internet existed, but not for the folks at home, and there was no Web at all.

The media was a different animal, back then. I delivered the newspaper as a kid, on a bicycle with big canvas bags slung over the handlebars. People received their news from me on their lawn or driveway or front porch. They also watched news broadcasts on the networks, and read, like my parents did, various periodicals. Typically, the nightly news on TV and the daily newspapers went together hand in glove, in a complementary linear fashion. Periodicals, such as Time or Newsweek, created, supplemented or helped drive the larger stories. And although there were always “Letters to the Editor”, the system was effectively closed to the consumer. The media was the authority, the arbiter of what made news. You might petition the media for some reason, but it was not responsible to you.

Once widespread adoption of the Web by the populace reached critical mass (circa 1995, with apx. 16 million users then surfing the Web¹), the demand for interaction naturally started to become the driving force on the Web. Connectivity on the Internet really means connecting people to other people—their ideas, their shared information. So while the “walled garden” of AOL eventually fell into disrepair because the company couldn’t grok the meaning of the Web to society, newer social networking sites appeared that offered a new and more robust form of open community and communication. Today, with over 1.5 billion users on the Web, more than nine times the number of people who were online in 1995 use Facebook alone. Nor are these people—and I hope you’ll pardon me making such an obvious statement—merely sharing recipes, jokes, and pictures of the family (although they certainly do that). No, like me, millions of people share and discuss the salient news of the world. They leave comments to news agencies as freely as they do to each other, and they expect some form of interaction; they expect, at least, to be heard. They blog and keep up with blogs. They share with various communities online, such as are found at FriendFeed. They tweet throughout the day on Twitter and follow not just friends or celebrities but news aggregators and media analysts.

Today, the near-ubiquity of the Web—enabling users to share massive amounts of information, pretty much anytime and anywhere, with an audience who are, themselves, no longer confined to a single or passive role—means the media cannot continue to operate under their comfortable old M.O. The shift is already well underway. What Steven Walling says of Wikipedia, that “An honest analysis of Wikipedia cannot divorce the content from the software and the community”, is becoming true of the media in general, after a fashion. Or, as Emily Bell, head of digital content at Guardian News and Media, put it in a lecture at the University College Falmouth, “There are two lessons here – one is that the news business is struggling to understand the language of the web, the second is that tools plus users equals content, both are key to the future of journalism” [see also "Emily Bell on The Future of Journalism"].

We are, many of us, de facto journalists now, compulsive fact checkers and news hounds. Armed with multiple means of recording the world around us, we are delivering the news on our virtual bicycles, throwing packets of information and analysis from the information highway right into the laps of our readers (whoever they may be), through their open window on the world. Our future is one of greater and greater connectivity. This is a good thing. It will, in the end, ask us all to be more responsible members of our world-wide community. But it will ask this first of those who are professional journalists now. They will be expected to lead the way, to set the example, to show the old paradigm the door and properly usher their profession into the new way of the world.

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Update. From a salient Op-Ed piece by Frank Rich, titled “The American Press on Suicide Watch“:

…[T]his self-destructive retreat from innovation is hardly novel in the history of American communications. In the last transformative tech revolution before the Internet — television’s emergence in the late 1940s — the pattern was remarkably similar. The entertainment industry referred to TV as “the monster,” and by 1951, the editor of the industry’s trade paper, Variety, was fearful that the monster would “eventually swallow up practically all of show business.” Movies had killed vaudeville a generation earlier. This new household appliance threatened to strangle radio, movies, the Broadway theater, nightclubs and the circus. And newspapers too: “NBC’s New ‘Today’ Attacked by Papers as Competition” screamed a front-page Variety headline in 1952.

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Additional resources: “Why comments suck (& ideas on un-sucking them)“; most anything by Jay Rosen;  50 Awesome Online Lectures for Social Media Masters.

Note: 1. Several things came together in 1995 that, collectively, acted as a booster rocket to the Web. A few examples: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was released and the “Browser Wars” began; the People’s Republic of China made its first connection to the Internet; the last commercial restrictions were lifted when the National Science Foundation ceased its sponsorship of the Internet backbone; Yahoo! and AltaVista were founded; Amazon.com, Inc. launched. [See "History of the Internet".]