How the media shapes our community, our culture, ourselves delivered by the University of YouTube’s favorite Professor of Digital Ethnography, Michael Wensch.

Media mediate our conversations. TV dominated the Boomer generation. The conversations dominated by a few, designed for the masses. Punctuated by 30-second advertising spots, the conversations create our culture of irrelevance, incoherence and impotence.

The public has been adjusted into incoherence and amused into indifference

Fast forward 25 years to the MTV generation characterized by: short attention spans, materialistic, narcissistic and not easily impressed.

In the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and mind-boggling stimuli….our collective response is, ” whatever”. Nice clip of the Simpsons illustrating how ‘whatever’ is synonymous with ‘meh’. But when the “American Idol” generation bursts onto the scene, ‘whatever’ is transformed to a statement, “I’ll do what I want” as they search for their authentic selves. Results? Focused more on ourselves than others and sharing less and less collective systems of meaning translates into special interest ‘soundbyte’ politics.

Why does this deeply matter? New media transforming the way of relating to others and creates new ways of relating to ourselves.

How are our conversations mediated on web 2.0? The medium shapes the conversation. The message. The possibilities for community. Especially when 1.4 billion people could receive and respond to your message. It kinda changes everything.