• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 29, 2007

Devices are no longer “publishing platforms.” They are active and unpredictable agents in the creation and distribution of content.

How we love our gadgets!

Making them smaller and lighter and able to do everything but tie our shoelaces. If they light up and sing in the process, all the better.

But personal media devices were never just about portability or convenience, or even “wow” factor. They helped change media from a consumable into a social environment. 

When historians look back at the 20th century, “mass media” may seem like a quaint phase in communication’s evolution, a prehensile description of technology already morphing even as it peaked in the 1950s. From the introduction of the transistor radio, mobile devices quickly became ways of turning mass media into my media.

In the three decades after the transistor put radio into cars, offices, and streets, the technology and the culture wanted familiar media to become personal and portable. It was all about headphones and individual spaces — whether it was with a Walkman, Discman, or a Game Boy. Miniatur-ization and mobility turned media into an omnipresent environment.

In the 1990s, digital interactivity upped the ante. Now we needed to stay in touch — with work, play, one another and our increasingly important digital data. We asked the technology to give us the power to do more from a longer range. And so, the cool toys brought with them serious implications. Pagers, cell phones, laptops, and BlackBerrys helped us end the last century with a cultural bang. Communication, work, and play were no longer anchored to a given place or time.

In this century, personal media gadgetry is pulling together all of the earlier themes. Miniaturization puts all media, even film and TV, in the pocket. But in order to get there, content must change shape. The iPod, data-ready phones, and TiVos are the tools of fragmentation, the wrenches that unscrew music from albums, headlines from newspapers, and TV episodes from a primetime ecosystem that lasted 50 years. Consumers win total control; marketers lose their former advantages: context and fixed attention.

But as content seemed ever-more personal this century, devices have also helped make it more social. Ringtones became a form of self-expression. While marketers use media to carry brand to consumers, a new generation of users appropriated media to brand themselves — with hip-hop artists, TV jingles, Homer Simpson’s “Doh!” The current wave of devices moves personal taste into public spaces.

Apple’s iPods were not just Walkmen with new technology. The very structure of the online playlist is made for sharing. The devices around them make users into participants in the media distribution system. Consumers have plugged their digital cameras into online posting networks such as Flickr. Image-swapping via phonecam has become the fastest-growing form of mobile content.

Devices are no longer “publishing platforms.” They are active, unpredictable agents in the creation and distribution of content. Users, not programmers or advertisers, define themselves as audiences now, sharing tastes and carving niches of taste on their own. Mass consumption has become self-expression.

It’s not mass media. It’s not even “MeMedia.” It is now our media.