Instant Media to Smite Old Media From the Democrat Convention Floor

By John Conroy Aug 25, 2008

2 comments

Political National Conventions are the unlikeliest of venues to find anything noteworthy or novel, but the Democrats' party this time around comes with a new and quite interesting entertainment. The addition of a bunch of 'grass-roots mobile bloggers' will post video, pictures, opinion and coverage direct from the Convention floor to a central hub at Zannel.com called the PoliticsBlue channel. Not a groundbreaking idea, really. More an inevitable and welcome addition to the modern media landscape. But potentially a watershed event which will herald new media adoption among the technophobe proles.

As Twitter has repeatedly shown, the traditional newswires just cannot beat the mobile/microblogger newsvine for speed. The off-camera breaking news and more interesting rumors will, you can rest assured, come from the bloggers with their mobile phones in either video or 140-char format. Which is why the only other professional group to embrace Twitter, apart from Web professionals, has been journalists. The difference is that journos still think The Whale is cutting edge communications, because they're fools who know very little indeed.

Old Media Channels Shown Up for the Bloated Relics They Are

Which brings us to the real significance of Zannel's political project: popular adoption of microblogging and instant mobile media. It takes a showcase event to get people to notice the benefit of a killer technology. If something big breaks off-screen, as already mentioned, its something like Zannel or (more likely) the Twitterati who will get the scoop and spread the word, while the fat bureaucrats at Reuters shuffle papers and run the story past the lawyers, or whatever they do. And the old news communications channels will be shown up to the wider world for the bloated, 20th Century relics they are. Expect to see more stories in the New York Times and so on referencing Twitter, as happened in the wake of NASA's discovery of water on Mars, for example.

Which is no bad thing, many of you will agree, seeing as two or three press associations hold a cartel on the news and essentially get to filter what we hear and see. Which doubtless isn't as damaging as some libertarians would have us believe, but is not exactly healthy either.

And when the A.P/Reuters media cartel is finally routed, perhaps the truth about the lizard-people alien conspiracy involving the Rockefellers, JFK's driver and 2012/Nobiru will finally be disclosed to the American people; Elvis will return in triumph from exile in Uruguay, and The Greys will install Ron Paul as Preeminent National Chief Designer at the Republican bash a few weeks hence.

We can only hope so. In the same way that we pray that Steve Jobs' brethren from Zeta-Riticula, when finally the mother-ship arrives, prove less cruel and inhuman than their brutal delegate here on Earth.

Zannel is one of the more noteworthy mobile multi-media social networks, enabling communication via mobile/cell and the web. Check them out, and more particularly their PoliticsBlue channel.

End Transmission.