Pop Culture and Changing Technology

Technology has come a long way in my lifetime. Before my digital camera, I had a 35mm; before that, I had a 110mm and a Polaroid; before DVDs, I remember the Laser Discs they used in my grade school science classes—and before them, I remember VHS and Betamax tapes. And before I had an iPod, I had a CD player, a cassette player, and yes, even a record player.

I begin this week’s blog post this way because something happened last week that caused me both to remember my record player (it had Rainbow Brite on it) and to consider changing technology: Michael Jackson died.

Michael Jackson, the artist behind the first vinyl record I remember buying (it was Bad and I was four) died, and I got the news on my iPhone, via an emailed link to a post on TMZ.

The day the King of Pop died may also have been the day social media became a credible source.

I have mixed feelings about TMZ and other blogs of its nature. Part of it is my personal opinion that celebrities are people, too, and they deserve at least a little privacy. Part of it is that I’ve never found reading from a screen to be as satisfying as holding a newspaper or magazine. And part of it, too, is that for all my evangelizing that blogs are important and bloggers matter, I’m not really sure that most blogs are quite “there,” as far as having research departments and full-time news staffs and careful editors and all the other things that newspapers employ to make sure they have well-written, well-researched, timely news stories. But without all of these limitations, blogs do have something that traditional media does not: the ability to break news as it’s happening and to go viral with it. (Some would argue that they also have the ability to break the news without the constraints of journalistic ethics—the downside to social media’s speed.)

All of this comes on the heels of the Associated Press’s recent, and very strict, social media guidelines issued to its staff. Guidelines that more or less ensured that the news agency—one of the nation’s largest—would get scooped by social media on one of the biggest pop culture stories of the year. It’s not that I don’t think that mainstream media outlets shouldn’t have waited before officially reporting the news… it’s just that I don’t think they should have held back on the speculation. A Tweet from an AP writer (on a personal or official account) saying: “Michael Jackson reported dead of cardiac arrest (unconfirmed); stay tuned for more details…” (at a whopping 93 characters, including the ellipsis) would have kept the outlet from looking like it had fallen completely behind. A more direct Tweet saying: “Yes, we’ve heard the MJ rumors. Waiting for confirmation before we officially report,” (at a mere 85 characters!) would not only have acknowledged the initial report but would have given the AP’s official stance on reporting the news—namely, that they (unlike blogs) were awaiting official word from a credible source. They might not have been the first to report the news, but there would have been an air of legitimacy to the AP’s Tweet that was lacking from TMZ’s series of blog posts on the subject.

But instead of being able to comment on rumors, the staffers at the AP (and, to be fair, seemingly all major traditional news outlets and bureaus) had to sit on their hands while social media beat them to the punch—and, to add insult to injury, they had to concede in their eventual articles that TMZ was on the story first. It was amazing to see the “big dogs” of traditional media begin sentences with “According to TMZ…” or “Celebrity blog TMZ reports…” because for the first time it showed that the media was conceding the power and influence of its nontraditional sister outlets. After all, when the news broke, people weren’t clamoring for the evening editions of their local papers. They were turning to Twitter and blogs.

I don’t necessarily think this is the harbinger of Associated Press 2.0—but I do think that it’s a sign that traditional media has a lot of catching up to do. After all, things have changed a lot since 1987, when my mom took me to the record store in Bassett Center Mall to buy Michael Jackson’s latest LP. We have embraced the MP3 as a sign of changing technology… maybe we should embrace the blog, too.

Image credit: Flickr user bernissimo, used under a Creative Commons license.