On the flight back from Lon­don on Sun­day I finally had a chance to answer a Q&A email inter­view with Terry Heaton, a long­time friend who, as co-founder of AR&D, is one of the most forward-thinking peo­ple in the world of broad­cast media.

For the full inter­view, see see the AR&D Media 2.0 Intel Report. Here’s an excerpt from our interview:

You were the per­son who coined the phrase “per­sonal media rev­o­lu­tion.” What does that really mean? Who are peo­ple revolt­ing against? How wide­spread is the revolution?

The peo­ple are revolt­ing — that’s from the Marx Bros. movie Duck Soup, no?

It’s hard to rec­og­nize tec­tonic shifts when you’re still in its begin­ning phases. Almost any intel­li­gent dis­cus­sion of our media cul­ture today needs to address the rise of per­sonal media. By the early 2000s, con­sumer gad­gets and com­puter appli­ca­tions had come down far enough in price and were becom­ing sim­ple enough to use that mil­lions of us began cre­at­ing per­sonal media. Low price, sim­plic­ity and the flu­id­ity of dig­i­tal media com­bined to allow us to do more than just snap pho­tos (which has been around for decades) but also to become ama­teur film­mak­ers, cre­ate dig­i­tal sto­ries and mashups, record audio inter­views and the like.

The real rev­o­lu­tion came when these works weren’t merely stored on our per­sonal devices but released into the wild, unleash­ing an anar­chic, demo­c­ra­tic cacoph­ony of voices and view­points. By shar­ing and con­nect­ing on sites like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and Face­book, we turned our per­sonal media into social media.

Like Dan Gillmor’s “We, the Media,” Dark­net was one of the sem­i­nal works about the rise of per­sonal media. Given all that’s taken place since, do you feel your vision has been validated?

I wrote the book as warn­ing call in antic­i­pa­tion of esca­lat­ing clashes between media titans against grass­roots media pub­lish­ers in the areas of copy­right law, remix cul­ture and inno­va­tion when it was becom­ing plain that we were enter­ing an era of media that was becom­ing more decen­tral­ized, frag­mented and personalized.

So, yes, every­one is still stick­ing to their scripts. By and large, tra­di­tional media have not embraced the ethos of com­mu­nity and shar­ing that under­lie this emerg­ing new bottom-up media cul­ture. But my view of the fun­da­men­tal shifts in the medi­a­s­phere has evolved since “Dark­net” was written.

One of the things about the per­sonal media rev­o­lu­tion that I find most intrigu­ing is that the peo­ple for­merly known as the adver­tis­ers are also among those “play­ing media.” They have their own revolt, it seems. Do you see that as well?

Keep in mind that “media” can refer to con­tent cre­ators (pro­duc­tion houses) or dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels (net­works). While most brands still haven’t found suf­fi­cient pay­out in play­ing media, we’ve cer­tainly seen cam­paigns like Dove Evo­lu­tion become online sensations.

I think the smart play is for brands not to try to cre­ate the next “viral hit” on YouTube but to work with con­tent part­ners to cre­ate use­ful com­mu­nity plat­forms that fos­ter dia­logue and dis­cov­ery. If local TV news goes away, this is where the sta­tions’ tal­ent will migrate to. In fact, I sus­pect we’ll increas­ingly see for­mer broad­cast news peo­ple set up their own sites that com­pete with old-guard sta­tions still stuck in Web 1.0. With the advent of cloud com­put­ing, startup costs are approach­ing zero, so there’s no ques­tion that a hand­ful of tal­ented video pro­duc­ers and jour­nal­ists can do a bet­ter job than 95 per­cent of the TV sta­tion web­sites out there today.

How have things changed or pro­gressed in the years since Dark­net was first pub­lished? What has sur­prised you?

Two things sur­prise me. First, that the act of shar­ing often trans­forms the works in ways large and small. The work of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism cap­tured on a video-enabled cell phone is remark­able on its own, but it turns into a vir­tual town­square when lay­ered over with user com­ments. For exam­ple, Kansas State Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor Michael Wesch’s video Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us had pal­pa­ble power by itself, but it achieved expo­nen­tially more influ­ence when embed­ded in tens of thou­sands of blogs and viewed more than nine mil­lion times on YouTube.

It also sur­prises me that adver­tis­ing dol­lars haven’t flowed to Web news and enter­tain­ment sites in a big way yet. So you can’t really blame Hol­ly­wood for not want­ing to trade ana­log dol­lars for dig­i­tal pen­nies, or blame news pub­lish­ers for not fold­ing their print pub­li­ca­tions when there is still no busi­ness model for online news. Hav­ing said that, news pub­li­ca­tions are ensur­ing their own obso­les­cence by not lay­ing the ground­work for their dig­i­tal des­tiny.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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