Something really interesting happened to me on Monday night at around 10:30pm. I was watching a program I’d DVR’ed a few days earlier and my wife came into the room.
“The president is about to make an announcement. I think they got bin Laden,” she said.
But that wasn’t the interesting thing. It was what I did next that surprised even me. I went to the office, grabbed my laptop and brought it back to the TV. Only when I booted it up did I turn the TV to CNN. While I waited for the president to speak, I started to look for my information on the Web. It wasn’t because the President was late in coming out to report the news or because CNN’s coverage was bad. It wasn’t. They had all sorts of details that were important to the story.
So, why did I boot up my PC? Two reasons:
- The web is now just as much or more viable as TV as a way to get news.
- The conversation was bigger
And I wasn’t alone. Twitter users we’re averaging 5,106 tweets per second, seceond highest in the company’s history. “Osama bin laden is dead” achieved google’s highest keyword ranking ever.
It represents a fundamental shift in thinking. A TV watcher can certainly flip through the channels but can only watch one thing at a time (Picture-in-Picture notwithstanding). A web user can hit CNN, Google News and Al Jazeera all in a few minutes without missing a thing.
But it’s more than that.
For at least 40 years, people have turned to the most powerful medium on earth to get news, entertainment and more. When major news events happened, people stayed glued to their TVs. After, they might go outside or over to a neighbor’s and discuss what they’d just seen.
But this is a marathon, not a sprint, and the winner is about to be overtaken. Everything that television can provide, the web now has, and more. Not only that, it gives its users more than a regional or national perspective. It allows them to see virtually every perspective. So, while TV is still a part of the media salad we still choose, the Web is more than just a topping. It’s now becoming the media of choice. It simply provides more.
Then there’s the conversation part. Instead of talking with a neighbor, a web user can share with the world. In the case of the death of Bin Laden, there were more opinions than tweets. The subject was spread across every type of social media available, from facebook to video blogs, from political sites to satire sites. It shows that, while surfing the web is a solitary activity, it allows every user the equal opportunity to be a part of a conversation being had by the entire world.
The web has become the most important medium on our planet. And that is a bigger statement that many of us realize. Instead of a website being an afterthought, it’s a mandatory. Instead of sending out a “no comment,” companies are forced to tweet it to their followers. Instead of watching a one-sided conversation from the news, we’re all part of it. And what’s happening is nothing short of a revolution- just ask people all over the middle east.
The king is dead. Long live the king.