Sunday, September 14, 2008

The first law of mass media

Posted by Seth Godin on August 27, 2008
From:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/the-first-law-o.html

Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.

Radio ads used to be live, personal and spoken by an individual.
TV ads used to feature actual people, demonstrating something, usually live.
Phone calls involved a live speaker, talking, with permission, to another person.
Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults.
Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs.
Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages.

One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun morphs from "you" to "me" to "us" to "the corporation" ...

The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.

The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win.

My name is Seth Godin and I approved this message.

1 comment:

Miao said...

Yes, it is true, and it seems that we cannot change it.
Finally every new communication medium will become a common one. Then we will loose our interests of them and change to another new one.