Barb Dybwad over at Mashable reported that Australia’s Griffith University is making a Twitter class part of its required curriculum for journalism students. Meanwhile, it’s become utterly common for bloggers to routinely acquire press credentials, and our little digital/interactive agency’s been given full-on media passes for events we’ve covered without anyone batting an eye.
This is not how things used to be. Those of us who’ve been part of the whole Internet generation started out as fringe players. I remember when bloggers were looked down upon in a big way. Heck, I remember a time in the 1990s where I had a client tell me she thought the web itself was a fad.
When we produced the Internet’s first-ever rock concert on the web, scooping MTV veejay and Internet pioneer Adam Curry (thanks Adam, I still treasure your email!), and brought the performances of Moist, Matthew Sweet, Blues Traveler, and Hootie & The Blowfish to an online audience, we used the most basic of tools that became a big part of the social media revolution all these years later. Today, of course, these things are utterly commonplace- witness U2’s awesome partnership with YouTube to bring their Pasadena concert to the web- but back in the day, this was something unique and cool. And fringe. It’s hard to believe that once upon a time nobody thought this stuff had any real value.
It seems like any new technology or tool starts out like that- you need some pioneers who see its potential and try to do cool things with it. Eventually it catches on, and then it becomes mainstream. When it’s mainstream it loses a lot of its cool factor. But it often becomes more useful.
As a guy who’s been around the Internet since forever, it’s fun to watch how the process of accepting new ways of doing things is accelerating. It took radio and TV quite a while to catch on. The web took a few years, too, as did blogging. Twitter and Facebook became widespread within months. And now colleges are teaching these tools to journalism students as a matter of course. I think that’s great, and I can’t wait to experience the stories that come out of this.
