Empowering the Bottom

What blogging and other social media look like to the world of main street media.  Chaos at the Door by Terry Heaton
So, let's take a moment to examine what's happening at street level, where the personal media revolution is taking place. Web and politics pioneer, Joe Trippi, made an important observation about it last year:

If information is power, then the Internet, which distributes information democratically to anyone who has access to it, is no longer distributing just information — it's distributing power.

And in a top-down society, it's empowering the bottom. Put more simply—in America, it's empowering the American people.

And the paradox of power is that discontent increases with opportunities for acting on it. The more the bottom is given the tools to make and distribute their own media, the greater their power; the greater their power, the greater their discontent and, along with it, the opportunity for acting on that discontent. This bubbling caldron of energy is profoundly anti-elitist and anti-institution, because the more the bottom surveys the landscape these days, the more they realize that our culture has failed them, and this energy is palpable in the halls of power.

Demographer Hazel Reinhardt presented the Ball State group with evidence of what she calls a "Perfect Storm" of demographic and technological changes impacting the culture. Four demographic shifts will have a profound influence on the media.

• The aging of the population
• Growing racial and ethnic diversity
• The continuing and growing gap between the rich and poor
• Metropolitanization/Regionalization