Better and more profitable media

By Blanca de Lizaur, PhD, MA, BA, Content specialist.

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Redimensionador de tamaño de fuente

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Redimensionador de tamaño de fuente

New media

Robert Phillips, Edelman CEO. Interview in regards to the World Trust Survey 2012
Multimedia For media people Para: Videos

No transaction without TRUST; no trust without evidence of VALUES –But WHOSE values…?

A quick review of recent news from around the world, confirms the 2012 Edelman Barometer’s conclusions (25 countries, 30,000 persons surveyed), in regards to the remarkable loss of trust, respect and credibility, experienced by major institutions in the last few years –a crisis deep enough to negatively affect their maneuverability, and to obstruct their proper and efficient operation.
Let’s consider the case of communications media: A 40% credibility rating in countries like the USA and Europe, where people traditionally trusted their primary media companies, amounts to nothing, regardless of whether other institutions are faring worse.

In this article, including both the Edelman Barometer video and the above-mentioned information corroborating its claims, we present our analysis of how trust was lost and can be recovered. …As long as the stakeholders allow the establishment of some limits to agendas –…for their own benefit!
Not doing this would kill the Digital Society in which we have invested so much, before it can even operate to its full potential.

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THE POWER OF SOUND –…by its effects you shall know it; talk by Julian Treasure

In the same way that “no action is without an equal and opposite reaction”, there are no sounds that produce no effects.
And precisely because they generate things inside of us –they change us–, sounds are powerful: Just as they make us happy or well, they make us uncomfortable or ill.
That said, what do we know about them?; what are their effects?
Do we know how to use them, both in our professional lives (for example: as a brand for our product), as well as in our private lives?
Julian Treasure is a professional who creates sounds for marketing and for communications media. And today’s talk (the video) –the first of three–, simply and brilliantly introduces us to the world of sounds. Because “hearing better”, is living better…

SOCIALNOMICS ™, La revolución de las redes sociales
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SOCIALNOMICS ™, the social-media revolution -an exercise for TUNING UP OUR ABILITIES AS EXPERT READERS

An intense, vertiginous, hallucinating, …and absolutely partial video about social networks.
After reviewing what the digital age is bringing to our lives, the authors conclude triumphantly that the modelling force behind this revolution is people. They call it: Socialnomics (TM).
However, and through their own acceptance, it is not the people but consumption of those who are “connected”, which is presently modeling the digital society.
If consumption drives the internet, then, agendas model internet contents -not people. That is: If we keep in mind that people who do not buy or who choose not to buy, who are not connected or who choose not to be connected, are citizens, too, and worthy of their civil rights and our respect, as well.
In other words: People are not in command in the internet (and therefore in the new society that is being built upon it), any more -or any less, than in other media in our days.
Furthermore: We dare to conclude that presently, Socialnomics (TM) implies the substitution of ideals and ideologies we had grown to take into account, for the raw mercantilization of every aspect of our lives.
Only if we realize that this is going on, will we be able to really create a digital society that is good for every human being, that takes everyone –connected or not, into account.

But this video permits us to exercise our reading abilities, in order to go deeper and further than where its authors took us. And this is its true virtue.

© Satori13
For everybody Para: Magazine

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING SPECTATOR has little to do with the Digital Revolution

The Digital Revolution (i.e.: the proliferation of the internet, personal computers, mobile/portable devices, etc.) is currently being blamed for the dramatic sales fall that traditional and electronic media are experiencing. This article, originally published in 1994, witnesses to the unfairness of this myth: The Internet was officially born in 1993, only one year before this article was written, and its reach in Mexico was still scarce at that time; yet media had already been losing sales and audiences steadily –for years in some cases, and for decades in others.

The fact is so evident that few –if any, of the media products’ sales recorded here (including a couple of national newspapers), ever recuperated their previous audiences, and many have disappeared altogether:

Contrary to professionally-generated mainstream-media contents, those internet’s contents that have been generated by the general audience (think of FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, e-mail chains and attachments, and the like), are majoritarianly “clean” (amiable in regards to the general audiences’ values, ideas and beliefs). And people are consuming them massively, close to the verge of addiction.

Society cannot possibly deliver mass media a more conclusive message, or put its case in a stronger way.
What are they waiting for to react accordingly…?

© Yuri Arcurs
For media people Para: Magazine

If it is not the readers’ fault, WHOM SHOULD WE BLAME…?

This article analyzes the consumption of cultural works in Mexico, at the end of the XXth century.
In the years elapsed since it was published, however, the number of copies magazines sell -like national papers’ and other media products’ sales, have plummeted.
Several best-selling magazines it mentions, have disappeared from the market; and others are publishing less than a fourth of the copies they did at that time, as a consequence of the very same issues this article analyzed: Creators, producers and distributors of both “high brow” (elite) and “low brow” (popular) works, have alienated themselves from their audiences, and through the continuous opposition to the latters’ values, ideas and beliefs (through both veiled and overt contestation), they have lost their consumers’ trust. And also their money.

In other words: What this article concluded, is still true, including the fact that people -even the younger generations, are reading… –yes, indeed!; but not what some would like them to read.
In the end, this is more positive for society in many senses, than the consumption of media works that would otherwise have corroded even more, the social and cultural tissue of our countries.
What we have observed is the displacement of average audiences, towards works that better reflect the latter’s values, ideas and beliefs, as we should have expected since the beginning: This facilitates the survival of the larger part of the social group and its culture –the part that has been less influenced by media in general, by the way.

Anyone could have foreseen what has happened, from a social-anthropology or systems-theories’ frames of study –we certainly did, and published it all around, while many stared at us in disbelief. Nowadays media fear for their very survival; but the social-body demonstrates a vigour and an intuition, few would have vowed for. It will soon produce new works, away from dominant content agendas, that most of us (but sadly not all), will love.

La revolución de los medios de comunicación
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The new-media revolution shows glimpses of THE NEW CONFRONTATION: That of MENTALITIES

This video gives way to multiple interpretations. What few people would comment on, however, is its gnostic origin. Signals are all around it: From the word Prometheus to the eye in the triangle; to the astounding initial statement that every human being is a god, and that through the internet he/she will become omnipresent, omnisapient (will know everything and all of us), and allmighty…
This kind of signals is key to decoding its message efficiently, and to take a knowing and responsible stance in regards to the phenomena we are living.

Limpia de códigos
For media people

HELP SAVE MEDIA PEOPLE! (artists, creators, producers, publishers, distributors…)

Communications media ARE in a terrible financial state; and not only in Spain, but in the better part of the Western world as well.

Last week news-programs loudly celebrated the fact that in 2010 “more Spanish films than ever before” had been shown (…!) in Spanish movie theaters; but this week only a few mentioned the fact that Madrid’s movie theaters had 9% fewer patrons than last year… (Report on the Economic and Social Conditions of Madrid’s Residents, apud “Qué” (daily newspaper), October 13, 2011, p. 4).

MacLuhan believed that “the media is the message”, because the dizzying developments in the technology we use to transmit media contents, dazzle and appeal to us in-and-of themselves –it calls out for attention like a volcanic eruption would. That said, the frenentic technological race is coming to an end –in addition to proving to be extraordinarily costly, both for the media as well as for society. …And the contents that those in power allow us to transmit, are further and further removed from what their respective societies would naturally and spontaneously choose to consume, if allowed to.

The “ropes” are on fire; and it would appear that few in the world of Communications media –traditional, electronic or digital–, are prepared to risk it all, shouting “water for the ropes!”. The majority are terrified of speaking out, and of admitting that something is terribly wrong. And therefore they are losing trustworthiness, influence, audience, and money.

As we already said on another occasion: Every nation needs media; but the media –without its people– cannot exist at all…