There is a new book out about media disruption and transformative effect of online communities on the way organizations relate to their constituents. The target audience is marketers, but its observations and recommendations are relevant to every single person who works in media.
The book is called The Chaos Scenario, and it’s both devastating in its portrayal of the state of top-down media and intriguing in its examination of new models of communication. What’s more, it’s funny as hell. We haven’t enjoyed reading a book this much in quite a while. The author, Bob Garfield, is a veteran ad critic, a capable journalist and a ruthless tell-it-like-it-is essayist. Here’s our review.
Get this book. Share it with your colleagues. Ponder its conclusions. Prepare for a new world.
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This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 7:12 am and is filed under Fake News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
I got the book about a month ago.
Its a good book and, while vastly entertaining, Chapter 6 Comcast Must Die merely details Bob Garfield’s personal battle with a corporation which not only doesn’t get it but wants you to not get any of it either.
Despite his having years to reflect on the state of the media, he is remarkably free of workable ideas for dealing with the situation of what is happening with all ad sponsored media.
If he reflected what was really happening, instead of being blinded by his own light, he would see that his subtitle “Listen or Perish” in fact addresses two constituencies, the Media businesses and all other businesses.
The perils of being in the Media business are the inevitable result if the structural capabilities and limitations of relying on unidirectional 1:N communication channels
The broadcasting industries are all special cases of renting megaphones to village idiots. As long as access was scarce and barriers to entry could be controlled and maintained high, there was gold in them there hills!.
It was entirely immaterial that some scribbled in print, some shouted on the radio while others looked the fool on television.
The internet is capable of carrying any message using a time shifting, media shifting, on-demand N:M communications channel which entirely subsume and fundamentally outstrips the 1:N capabilities on the broadcast model.
Businesses actually need two way communications with their customers.
The outlook for all other businesses is bright, the outlook for the mediabusiness is glum indeed.
Media businesses are all being shown up for the synchronous limited capability greedy hucksters they are.