Love this interview with Levar Burton on Building 43 – Communities without Gatekeepers
Broadcast media & commercial communication are one-way conversations bundled with sales messages, actors, branding, and entertainers. Often it is marketing made to look like authentic human interaction.
he goal of most mass media communication is to generate revenue.
When you unpack Broadcast media messaging we find it is often a partial hollow representation of human communication. In the age of mass media, companies and large organizations have controlled, or at the very least influenced, the messages that people receive in the broadcast channel.
Mass media messages have been tightly controlled. With revenue protection in mind, the distribution channel owners and funders have acted as the message gatekeepers.
No more.
Check out LeVar’s thoughts in the video above. He has has been a champion for challenging people to think, discover, and ask “what if?” for decades now.
In the Web 2.0 Social web, we are increasingly able to find and choose messages that make sense and resonate; conversations that enhance our perspective and our understanding. And ironically, it is technology that is extending our authentic conversations beyond our local reach.
The many-to-many Social Web now matches and extends beyond the reach of one-way broadcast media.
More than ever we are able to choose an alternative to the status quo of how we hear, understand, and discuss issues that involve all of us. With broadcast messaging declining and non-commercial communication increasing, we are finding connections with new people and forming new communities – along the way uncovering those things that make us more alike than different. We are able organize around different commonalities and undertsandings. It is here that we are collectively remembering that there is more to life than selling, consumption, and commercial agendas.
The hegemony of the idea gatekeepers is eroding every passing day.
And it is in this sharing of stories of being human, LeVar Burton says, we have an opportunity for imagination – An opportunity to say “what if …?”
We should not be afraid of, “more accountability and integrity in our communicating.” That, friends, is an starting point and ideal worth hollering about.
Filed under: Stories of Being Human Tagged: | Communication, culture, Marshall McLuhan, mass media, power, Social Media, Socratic method
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