This isn’t remotely a new observation, but after my musings about the more powerful reach of new media, I was strongly reminded this morning that social networking is more powerful because it’s more personal.
Christian Payne, aka Our Man Inside, aka @Documentally, is a freelance photographer and new media person, who puts a lot of his life and work online using a whole variety of text, audio and video tools. We’ve met in real life several times, but are more in contact online. This morning, he posted this AudioBoo:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/3088-baby-boy
[which I can’t seem to get to appear as an embed in WordPress in this margin of my time, sorry] … and which I heard, after being alerted via Twitter, within a few minutes of the happy event. Oddly enough, none of the mainstream news outlets carried this story. And why should they? About 2000 or so other babies were born in Britain in the last 24h (at a wild order-of-magnitude guess), so it’s not really news in that sense.
But to a specific, small group of people this was the biggest and best news of the day. And this snap is probably not Christian’s most technically brilliant shot ever, nor likely to be his biggest earner, but I’ll bet it’s one of the ones he cares most about:
The news of a newborn’s arrival, and a picture of their face, and the sound of their first cry … carried to all the people who care about them. That personalisation and relevance is part of the magic of new technology. It’s new and it’s very, very old at the same time.
Welcome to the world, @minimentally.
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