This week I took a little time out on my DJ show at House of Sound to talk about an observation I made Sunday night while watching the Mars Curiosity rover landing and reading the flood of tweets coming from those I follow. As with anything, there was the typical 140 funnies, the best from Curiosity itself when it tweeted:
I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL
Apparently science, or in this case a cheeky planet exploring robot, has a sense of humor. :)
But my attention on Twitter was caught by a swell of media criticism in the midst of this historic event, that prompted this tweet from me:
People griping about not getting timely #nasa news from the news media is like griping about not getting good music from record companies.
So I decided to take a quick 8 minutes to discuss my thoughts on this criticism and why I think it holds no merit.
First, I discuss NBC and The Olympics(TM). Fat chance that you'll be able to change the financial model of one of the biggest media events that only comes around once every 4 years, and hope to crowd source that coverage. But many other great events like the 3 day Pickathon concert in Happy Valley, Oregon is available to you on a free, high definition quality live stream. You're very very lucky. So lucky in fact, that while you sat in front of your laptop watching the Mars Curiosity rover's successful landing via a live stream video, you chastised your local affiliate TV stations for not airing this top story on the 11 O'Clock News. Why? You already have the story unfolding live in front of you in HD and you're following real-time commentary (even from the rover itself) on Twitter, therefore you're not missing anything from the story that your affiliate has and you don't. Quite the opposite, in fact. You're voting with your eyeballs by watching ustream.tv and their ad roll rather than theirs. If that's a problem for them I'm sure they'll attempt to address it at some point. They are a business after all.
We do not live in a time of media scarcity. We have great riches, and more to come.
Podcast Monday August 6th 2012 (Right Click to Download)
