2010-02-01

The Boundaries Between Amateurs & Professionals-New Media (2)

The latest Google Ad shown on Super Bowl:
Parisian Love

Yep, Google teaches you everything in life, how to find love and how to raise a child.

With Google, Wikipedia and Youtube, everyone in this world now gets to know everything of something, or something of everything. Knowledge is no longer a privilege or a compulsory test, it's become our own choices and learning has become our daily habits.

With those biggest information sharing platforms on Internet, the boundaries between amateurs and professionals are more and more blur. One can no longer assume that he gets ahead of other people just because he knows a bit more---click google, in 2 seconds, others will catch up.

Therefore, how do we judge the credibility in terms of online PR campaigns? It is said opinions from amateurs are generally more trustworthy than those from professional journalists. What if ordinary audience can no longer distinguish who is the amateur and who is the professional?

The new trend of "social search" may suggest that people don't really care about "the professionals" in terms of online credibility. The boundary's gone blur, and so they turn to those whom they know, those who belong to the same tribes and share same interests.

I think that's the basis for Seth Godin's Tribe theory: because of social media, communication has gone from vertical structure to parallel structure. No more amateurs and professionals, just you and me, us and them.

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