Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Me Media
Earlier today, my colleague, Anthony Townsend, sent a note to Technology team members letting us know that he has started using a private del.icio.us account to keep his stuff “better organized and to use it for personal bookmarks” (this in addition to IFTF del.icio.us account that serves as a collective bookmarking site for everyone at IFTF. I've been using a private del.icio.us account for my stuff for a while, for the same reasons as Anthony. Others chimed in to say they also do this. To me this is a weak signal of something I've been thinking about for a while--people spending more and more time immersed in their own content (content they are creating, managing, storing, etc.). I believe people will be spending more and more time looking at their own content—Facebook and blogs posts they created, Youtube videos they uploaded, their Flickr photo stream. In fact, this will compete with their ability and willingness to look at other people’s content. Ever found yourself reading and re-reading the blogs you've posted and comments people made? Music lists you've created? Searching for ratings of your posts or pictures on various community sites? To me these are all symptoms of the "me media" culture—spending more time on content created by me or about me. For a while we’ve been talking about a shift from mass to personal media, i.e. media tailored and customized to my individual interests/needs. “Me media” is the extreme form of this--not customizing media created by others to my interests but simply having me and my creations at the center of my media universe.