Carpe Medium

Hold everything!

Many years ago, when I was a producer for CBS News, there was a kind of hyper-sensitivity to phone calls.

We might run a story and conceivably 7 million people might watch it.

However, if the phones lit up after the story, meaning 100 or so people called the network to complain, all hell would break loose.

It was a funny kind of reaction.

100 people out of 7 million is beyond statistically insignificant.

Yet it elicited panic in the newsroom simply because ‘average’ people don’t call into a TV news operation unless they are very very upset.

But even if 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 people are very very upset – who cares?

The news establishment is very very sensitive.

Very.

I am thinking of this this morning as I read about the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday, effectively putting public policy and elective offices up for sale to the highest bidder.

Now, any corporation can write a check for any amount of money to buy as much air time (or newspaper space, though that is unlikely) as it wants to promote a particular point of view or pimp for a particular candidate.  It’s all about a Free Press.

Well, I can understand the theory, but the prospects for democracy vs. kleptocracy seem increasingly dim.

The UK seems to do just fine banning all commercial ads from TV.  That, however, is never going to happen here.

Instead, I think, we can move to the other extreme.

Carpe Medium.

That is, for those whose public education did not include Latin, Seize the Medium.

The web is a really great device for linking up like-minded folks.

And while Cargil might be able to buy vast swaths of 30-second spots on TV to pimp for the candidate who is going to give them the best deal at our expense, we do have a recourse.

Facebook now has 370 million members.  That’s a lot.

So the idea of getting 1 million like-minded folks together online is not out of the question. In fact, it’s probably pretty likely.

The web has been good at getting those 1 million people to send in $10 each, but even at those rates, they’re gonna be buried by Cargil and it’s ilk.

Instead, I think, the next step is simply to bypass the ad buys and the networks entirely.

If you had 1 million people with video cameras or flip cams, and of those 1 million people created their own 30 second video spots and then flooded the blogosphere with those videos and associated tweets to see them, you could create a tidal wave of media (with a specific point of view) that would effectively bury the Cargil ad campaign.

If 100 phone calls to NBC news made the newsroom go nuts, image what 1 million videos would do.

Upload all of them to iReport at CNN and see what happens.

A media tidal wave, all focused on one thing.

Or one candidate.

No one has harnessed the media in this way… yet.

No one has even come close.

But someone did something very similar about 200 years ago.

Before Napoleon, armies in Europe were professional affairs – well trained, well equipped. Like NBC or CBS News.

Or even Fox.

They were small, perhaps no more than 25,000, but they were professionals.

Napoleon instituted the idea of the Citizen Army.  And the draft.

He built an army of 3 million people.

The Grand Army, and he swept across Europe.

OK, they were ill trained and ill equipped – sometimes only pitchforks, but boy did they work out for him.

If only he hadn’t had that bad winter in Moscow.