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

Media mediates our conversations. TV dominated the Boomer generation. The conversations dominated by a few, designed to be consumed passively by the masses. Punctuated by 30-second advertising spots, the conversations created our “modern” 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.

Wensch claims that “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 to mean, “I’ll do what I want” as they search for their authentic selves. Results? As we focus more on ourselves than others and share less collective systems of meaning, special interest ‘soundbyte’ politics will emerge.

Why does this deeply matter to us as individuals or as a society? New media is transforming the way we relate to others and creates new ways of relating to ourselves.

Think about how 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.