Global Cities Blog
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What is trending? It’s question that users of the social media micro-blogging site Twitter constantly ask. Being aware of just what the hotly tweeted topics are allows them to feel they are in the know, up to date and (if we still used the phrase)…on the ball.
But there’s much more to what is happening, or about to happen, than what is popular right now. Being caught up in the moment can confuse the picture.
As a teenager I was friends with James Truman and we’d both been blown away firstly by progressive rock and then by punk and we were gripped by the energy of the music and we thought there was nothing else out there that mattered. At least I thought so. But James knew otherwise.
One time in his Sheffield flat he kept playing to me the Abba song :”Money, money, money” over and over and saying “Listen to it; it’s got impact. It’s burlesque. It’s got style.” I never understood then what he meant but I do now.
James could see beyond the immediate popularity of the current and that style would follow in the wake of raw rock. He went on to be one of the most significant publishers in the USA and became Editorial Director for Conde Nast, heading up such titles as New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair. As for me…well, I went in a different direction.
So, I was interested recently to catch a broadcast interview with James in which he laid out his vision of the future for magazines and sees them re-emerge, after a period of decline, as luxury items, rather like coffee-table books with the highest quality imagery, while books will move further from text to “colourful works of art with exquisite bindings and accessories”.
It is difficult to see how traditional newspapers may evolve. As the character Malcolm Tucker told a group of journalists in the satirical political comedy The Thick Of It: “No one reads your newspapers any more, I read that on the internet somewhere!” It is far to early to write off newspapers just yet, they are resilient. But the anticipated switch from printed newspapers to newspapers via iPad (and Kindle Fire!) has not happened in overwhelming fashion, yet.
Clearly digital media, web and social, has great force and I find it astonishing that so many communicators and marketers still rely on the old-style printed press release rather than DNRs or think that slapping up a Twitter feed is job done.
Within digital there’s a pulling together of features through social media sites. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the introduction of Timeline which will give us all the opportunity to put our lives literally online..posting everything from pics of us as babies and our school reports on to our profile page and allowing our friends and contacts varying degrees of access. This, coupled with IM and voice and video calls will make Facebook, and Skype (now acquired by Microsoft), one stop shops for communication and tops for stickability.
Over time this will see the decrease in the importance of web-sites. As the UK Government’s Digital Tsar, Martha Lane Fox tweeted: “Facebook is the internet.”
