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Thursday, August 30, 2012

New Media vs Social Media

In the new media space, we use a lot of terms fairly confusingly:

  • Old media
  • Broadcast media
  • Mainstream media
  • New media
  • Social media
  • Personal media
  • Citizen journalism
  • Citizen media

Old media is stuff that’s been around for a while. It’s traditional media, like books, TV, radio, newspapers, etc. Note that this isn’t specific to brands or organization sizes – the New York Times is old media, but so is the Boston University Daily Free Press or the Wasilla Frontiersman.

New media is stuff that’s new, in a technological sense. It’s audio, video, and text publication methods and tools that were previously inaccessible for publication purposes to the average person in the past. Sure, you could run your own newspaper, and many did, but you never had a shot at the same level of reach that a blog or podcast today can have.

Social media is interactive media, and it’s a subset of new media, since the tools that enable social media didn’t exist before, and therefore are a subset of new media. Social media is by definition interactive. You can blog, podcast, crank out videos on YouTube, host Blog Talk Radio shows, etc. all by yourself and no one else has to be involved for you to be creating useful media. For example, Seth Godin’s blog is new media, but not social – comments are turned off. Is it still useful? Absolutely. Is it new media? Yes. Is it social? No way.

Social media is the opposite – it’s media that REQUIRES the participation of others. Twitter, for example, would never have existed without other users in the network. PodCamp as a conference would never have existed if it was only one person who showed up. Take any of the social networks, remove the people, and you have something not useful at all.

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