Earlier today, I decided on a working title for my thesis - MASSIVEmedia. It's still a working title and I'd like to solicit feedback (comment!).
I chose MASSIVEmedia since I think it suggests a few of the unique characteristics of the platform I'm proposing. For the platform to be successful, it must allow a user to easily navigate massive amounts of content (much of which could be crap) in an effort to find what's interesting, useful, and entertraining for the user. It's also mass-ive since it flips traditional media on its head, potentially giving the masses the power to create content that is mass distributed. In the old mass media model, only the big gatekeepers (think G.E., News Corp, Disney, Viacom, TimeWarner) could control what content gets to the masses. Increasingly, these companies are controlling both the content creation and the content distribution. With this platform anyone can create media and the media gets distributed based on its merit, to those who know they want it or would likely want it.
This is a BIG idea - I know it, but I'm trying to make some small steps toward figuring out whether something like I'm describing actually could be created.
Anyway, I just signed up for web hosting at DreamHost on the recommendations of many friends. If you're interested in using them, tell 'em "melinger" sent ya and I get a kickback. They gave me a free domain registration so I picked up massive-media.org. Just about all of the other variants on this name were already taken so I guess I'll have to deal with the dash in the middle...
Posted by dan at March 9, 2004 02:09 AMSince you are soliciting feedback...
I am fond of the MASSIVEmedia title, in particular I like the appeal to the power to the masses concept. Your project seems very timely, exploring a time that I hope is just around the corner where audience becomes participant and producer. When this occurs, actually, for this to occur we will need a couple of things. Distribution channels and a means to filter this massive amount of media. Perhaps there is something in the meta-filter concept that I see happening in the blogging world where things are very community referential (as opposed to self-referential) and discussion (media) moves forward by consent (of course with individual and small group tangents).
In any case, I look forward to following the progression of your thesis.
Posted by: Shawn Van Every at March 9, 2004 05:31 PM
hmm..this is quite interesting