New media news

I missed my blog’s anniversary. It’s not that I’m sentimental or anything, but I’ve been writing here for 7 years and that seems quite a long time for a blog that deals with new media. In a week in which the news has been dominated by the Wikileaks affair, in which Twitter was reported as being worth $3.7BN, and in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine’s person of the year it seems that small niche interests have quickly become important features of the social, cultural and political landscape. Wikileaks was founded 4 years ago, Twitter 4 years ago and Facebook 6 years ago. So what’s new? Maybe it’s the level of over-exaggeration and misunderstanding. Time commended Zuckerberg on connecting the world. ‘In less than 7 years’ they said he has ‘wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the US.’ Facebook’s success should not be under-played, but to claim that it has created a ‘single network’ or, for that matter, ‘a social entity’ is simply wrong. Perhaps underneath it all is the simple fact that old media types, in their attempt to understand what’s going on and play it to their advantage, have fallen under the spell of new media.