Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! makes a great point about how particpatory media allows audiences to cluster around shared tastes, essentially supplanting the professional programmers of traditional media:
In the transition from atoms-to-bits, scarcity-to-plenty, etc. instead of some cigar-puffing fat-cat at a studio or label “stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular songs” we’re going to have the ability to create dynamic affinity based “channels”. Instead of NBC, ABC, CBS, HBO, etc. which control scarce distribution across a throttled pipe… we’re going to have WMFAWC, WMNAWC, TNYJLC and a whole lot more. (The what my friends are watching channel, The what my neighbors are watching channel, The New York Jewish Lesbian Channel, etc.)
Everyone has the possibility to program, but as Bradley points out earlier in his post, in reality it’ll still be a small percentage of ‘creators’ (1%) and ’synthesizers’ (10%) that provide the ‘programming’ for everyone else — the lurkers in his terminology.
Another cool point in a post chock full of them — you’d never want more than a small % of the audience to be active participants, because: “the hurdles that users cross as they transition from lurkers to synthesizers to creators are also filters that can eliminate noise from signal.”
