Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

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I was recently asked what was the biggest change in the last decade. I thought: easy, tri­bi­liza­tion. Mar­shall McLuhan pre­dicted it and it hap­pened. Peo­ple feel more con­nected these days but actu­ally they’re less con­nected as a whole. They’re now organ­i­cally build­ing tribes and speak­ing to each other in their own coded language.

Turn on the TV and watch politi­cians from across the aisle speak to one another. They don’t under­stand each other at all.

Look at what’s trend­ing on YouTube. If you’re geeky enough to be read­ing this far into this blog post you won’t under­stand why any­body would watch that stuff.

And you’re prob­a­bly not all that inter­ested in what your younger brother or your daughter’s friends are talk­ing about on Face­book either.

But if you’re on Twit­ter, read blogs or just read what your friends send you in emails, you’re are in effect com­mu­ni­cat­ing and shar­ing trib­ally on Inter­net. And these days, we’re shar­ing an awful lot.

More and more of what were read­ing and shar­ing now is per­son­al­ized. No longer do we only get the local paper or a national one, watch the evening news and read books from the best­seller list. We’re con­sum­ing news com­piled on RSS feeds, watch­ing selected TV pro­grams from hun­dreds of chan­nels on a DVR, down­load­ing books onto portable devices and get­ting tips on what to con­sume from mem­bers of our self-selected groups via blogs, Twit­ter and Face­book. We’re now spend­ing a lot more time con­sum­ing media but none of us are watch­ing the same thing. Gone are the days of the nation list­ing to the president’s fire­side chat or even all of us tun­ing into the same tele­vi­sion pro­gram. The only true mass audi­ence these days is the Superbowl.

I don’t mean to say this is bad. There are cer­tainly some neg­a­tive impli­ca­tions to media trib­al­iza­tion – like one group get­ting their news from Rachel Madow, another lis­ten­ing to Glen Beck and even more from John Stew­art but none from the likes of Wal­ter Cronkite. On the pos­i­tive side, we’re able to con­nect with peo­ple that share the same inter­ests and pas­sions. I for one, feel more informed thanks to the con­nec­tions I’ve made on blogs and Twit­ter. And as a bonus, the pro­lif­er­a­tion media out­lets has pro­duced much bet­ter enter­tain­ment con­tent then the days of the big three tele­vi­sion networks.