Are you ‘new media’ or ‘old media’? 11 differences.

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Are you ‘new media’ or ‘old media’? 11 differences.

OK, a bit of provocative fun. Are you old media or new media? Here are 11 differences. Agree? Disagree?

The difference between old and new media

  • New media is having a conversation; old media is delivering a lecture
  • Old media takes itself very seriously; new media has a sense of fun
  • New media welcomes criticism and attempts to learn from it, getting involved in the discussion; old media sees it as an attack, goes on the defensive, and even tries to exact revenge
  • Old media is establishment; new media is counter-culture
  • Old media refuses to acknowledge peer publications; new media shares the link love
  • Old media is an exclusive club; new media is open to all
  • Old media thinks twitter is a frivolous waste of time; new media doesn’t know how it managed before twitter came along
  • Old media constantly tells everyone how good and successful it is; new media leaves that job to others
  • Old media plays it safe and seldom gets it wrong; new media frequently gets it wrong, but apologises and carries on, regarding this to be the price paid for working closer to the edge
  • Old media is so competitive about its search engine ranking that it uses underhand tactics such as ‘rel=no_follow’ tags on outward links (google it if you don’t know what this is), to avoid bleeding page rank; new media recognizes that sharing and collaboration are the way forward
  • Old media has 10 000 twitter followers but follows just 12; new media has 10 000 twitter followers but follows 2500
12 Comments on Are you ‘new media’ or ‘old media’? 11 differences.
wine journalist and flavour obsessive

12 thoughts on “Are you ‘new media’ or ‘old media’? 11 differences.

  1. Trying to work out exactly who you are having a dig at, Jamie 😉 Some old media hack must have ruffled your feathers, perhaps… I’m not sure New Media is counter-culture though – surely it IS culture?

  2. New Media is a full time job – Old Media isn’t. New Media is addictive and counter-productive to children (and adults) improving their social skills. New Media is often mobile – Old Media is usually fixed.

  3. Please remember, dear Cathy, that not all older media are ‘old media’, nor are all younger media ‘new media’!

  4. Hey Jamie –

    I think new media also allows comments on all posts/articles. I encourage you to do the same and end your “main site” and “blog” dichotomy! Blog posts can be short or they can be long–use !–more– if you don’t want them to take up space on the home page.

    Cheers,

    Tyler

  5. New media talks about what it is interested in, old media talks about what I’m interested in, new media loves shouty, old media thinks brain should be engaged before mouth, new media thinks instant gratification, old media knows that some of the best things in life take time and work. New media thinks the medium is the message, old media knows that’s what Marsall Mcluhan said in 1964. Old media knows that nearly everybody has nothing worthwhile to say. New media loves the sound of vacuous comments. Old media gets satire. New media, well, it’s your turn to comment.

  6. I would question whether new media is really counter-culture. I think it is, as you say of old media, establishment. I have yet to see anything in new media that seriously questions the mores and values of contemporary society in any meanningful way, if that is what you mean by counter-culture. In my experience, new media is mostly about selling something or, worse still, selling yourself as some kind of “brand” (an odious word to use in connection with human beings).

    That it is open to all is true, which is, as you suggest, not true of old media. However, the caveat remains that it is open to all who are very good at sales and promotion (of their products, or themselves). Not everyone who has something interesting to say is good at those things. So while it is more democratic, and thankfully cuts out the middle man in most cases, it is also inherently selective, and not necessarily in a good way.

    Finally, following 2,500 people on twitter is pointless; even if you refine yourself to lists there is no purposeful way you can digest all that information from so many sources, and following is usually, apart from a very few, just a coutesy follow-back for those who have followed you.

  7. I find myself straddling the two. Virtually all of my work is either web or social media published and I do strive to be inclusive and relatively timely. However, I have concerns about those who focus more on being edgy than accurate.

    I think that, given the way Twitter, Facebook and the like spread messages so broadly in an instant, it is more important than ever to be responsible about what one says. Negative comments and bad news travel especially fast and retractions get little if any notice.

  8. Old media (still) seems to make money from what they write, new media, on the whole, is still trying to “monetize” their offering.

    As for new media being more “mobile”, have you tried catching up on your weekly reading on your IPad in the bath? Also, I still love that old book smell, until Kindle can replicate that, I still want to see my fauvorite reads stacked up on a bookshelf.

    All that said, most of my daily reading comes to me electronically, so I guess new and old media both have their place…

  9. Jamie, I love this blog and a very small handful of others that cover wine, but new media is far too frustrating for people like me who aren’t active creators/participants in the field like yourself. I tried Twitter for a few months (mostly to follow wine discussion) and was utterly exhausted by the “noise”-to-“useful discussion” ratio. And don’t get me started on Facebook, which is a morass that drains human souls.

    Blogs that look promising go without an update for 8 months, others become advertising platforms, others just get boring as the blogger’s energy wanes. I’m with Philip that so little (percentage-wise) of what’s out there on the Web is worthwhile.

    Kudos to you Jamie for creating one of the few “new media” websites worth visiting on a regular basis for us wine lovers. As for the big picture, I hope that something is germinating, and that new media will “take off” quality-wise … but I’m not holding my breath.

  10. What a great set of comments. I think I’m in agreement with most of them.
    I’d put this blog down as “newish” media in terms of Jamie’s classification and the comments are so much more interesting than twitter.

  11. This is tragic even by the standards of this never exactly well-written site. New media is unmediated bilge, old media is mediated bilge. That’s all anyone needs to know.

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