Calacanis Believes Humans Might be as Smart as the Media
Jason Calacanis posted the full audio of his conversation with “On the Media” host Brook Gladstone. It provided an amazing insight into the inner workings of the media and suggested that people’s intelligence has eclipsed the narrow formats that news has adopted. They’ve outgrown them.
I accept that the radio or the newspaper has space limitations (i.e. as much as advertisers, subscribers or sponsors are willing to pay for) and that editing will be necessary. But what was revealed in this interview was that too many nuances are getting lost. There’s useful detail, passion, insight, etc. in the source - the original conversation. It might be impractical to publish all of this, but when it’s a topic that is important to you, having it available enables much more productive conversations. Active listening instead of passive consumption. Individuals are taking control of their own PR and that’s a good thing.
Organizing all this source data is a huge undertaking, but at least the low cost of storage is helping people get started on archiving their “public” interactions and putting them together as a coherent body of work.
Like the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto argued that people are too smart to mindlessly consume advertising, Calacanis proves that they’re also too smart to mindlessly consume news. Moving away from the “Gotcha” moment is going to infuse new life into the media.
