:: Media Times Review Blog ::

By Dan Gillmor, BBC News

It is not an impact on the epic scale of an asteroid smashing into the Earth and killing off the dinosaurs, but the collision of technology and media is having profound effects on a more modern ecosystem.

Media are becoming democratised, and a global conversation is emerging.

The tools of production – used to create digital content such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, discussions, multiplayer games, mashups (I’ll describe each of those in more detail below) – are increasingly powerful and easy to use, yet decreasingly expensive.

Distribution is also becoming less expensive and easily arranged. The internet is a global platform, and the most important one for the future. But mobile-phone networks are part of the overall communications ecosystem, too, and for many on this planet a primary means of contact.

The democratisation of media is also, fundamentally, about the people we once called mere consumers. Their role is evolving from a passive one to something much more interactive, but they are blessed (or cursed, depending on one’s viewpoint) with an unprecedented variety of voices and services.

The democratisation of media creation, distribution and access does not necessarily foretell that traditional media are dinosaurs of a new variety. If we are fortunate, we’ll end up with a more diverse media ecosystem in which many forms – including the traditional organisations – can thrive. It’s fair to say, though, that the challenges to existing businesses will be enormous.

For my part, the most exciting aspect of this change is in the emerging conversation. Bottom-up media tools are conversational in nature, even though they can be used in a top-down mode. (It is more accurate, actually, to think of these tools as “edge-in”, deployed and used from the edges of networks.)

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