Davos Or GOP: The 'Elite' Don't Understand the New Media

[Annie]

This addresses Davos, but the same is happening within the GOP. In 2000, they were ahead of the Dems, but the Dems have caught up and surpassed as we head into the 2008 elections.

Blogs, online mags, even online MSM are NOT about the individual, but about the aggregate of ideas:

http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2007/02/01/davos07-my-big-conclusion/

Davos07: My big conclusion
Read More: davos07, media, newsinnovation, newspapers

Perhaps the most important ‘ding’ moment I had at Davos was that the powerful are, no surprise, one step behind in their understanding of the true significance of the internet: They think it is all about individual action when, in truth, it’s about collective action. And so they don’t yet see that the internet will shift power even more than they realize.

The powerful at Davos are just starting to talk about the internet and individual empowerment; we heard that often up in the Alps from media (this has become editors’ cant), leaders in politics (like the U.K.’s Gordon Brown and the EU’s Viviane Reding), business (Bill Gates), and even technology (Gates, again). They are not alone; we have heard this for quite a while back down on earth. And it’s certainly true that the internet enables each of us to find the information that matters to us, to publish what we think, and do what we want. But that is only a step along the way to the fate of society after the internet.

The internet is more about collective action. It is about connections. It gives us the power to find each other, to join together, to coalesce around issues, ideas, products, desires, and activities as never before, leaping over all borders, real and cultural. That is the historic progression of power that we are witnessing. That is what we heard from the people who truly understand this mechanism because they are building it: Caterina Fake and Stuart Butterfield of Flickr, Chad Hurley of YouTube, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. At Davos, these pioneers didn’t contradicted the machers when they said that the internet is about individualism; on that plane, they were talking past each other. But as I sat down to make my notes about what I learned at Davos, this is what hit me between the eyes.

In media terms, I said at Davos and here on the blog that we have seen a small-scale version of this progression:
1. First, big media let us interact with them, about their stuff.
2. Then big media beg us to give them our stuff.
3. Now we realize that our stuff is ours — not user-generated content for the big guys — and we expect them to come to us.

...

See this:

[ame]http://www.amazon.com/Army-Davids-Technology-Ordinary-Government/dp/1595551131/sr=8-2/qid=1170470094/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-9661131-3976152?ie=UTF8&s=books[/ame]