101 Culture

I saw these T-shirts with Barack Obama and Martin Luther King on them for sale in the Elephant and Castle market and it reminded me of the thinking I've been doing around how ideas spread in a digital world. The Obama campaign was a triumph and heralded as an example of how messages should be communicated in a connected world of digital media. And those are the two reasons that things are changing: 

1. All media is becoming digital. Film, image, audio and text becomes more flexible, entirely compatible and cheap to produce using digital tools.

2. Every individual is becoming connected to the internet, a two-way communications network.

The result of this is that everyone is becoming a producer of digital media. Whether you're making YouTube videos or sending emails, you're a producer of digital media. And you're constantly publishing  to your social group via Facebook, email and IM, let alone the potential audience of billions online.

This makes Dawkin's meme concept much more important than it used to be. I referred to it as the natural selection of the most interesting in my first ever post. Since everyone's a producer with a large potential audience, successful ideas replicate and evolve much faster than before. Compare it to watching a political broadcast 15 years ago. Your interpretation of it would most likely only be heard by those in the room with you.

The Obama campaign harnessed this brilliantly as evidenced by the mashup T-shirt above. Obama's race is more pertinent to the designer of this Tshirt so the link to Martin Luther King was his take on Obama's 'Change' idea.

So if you want to to spread ideas, whether you're an advertiser, journalist or teacher, you need to think how you're ideas will spread through the digital media produced by your audience.

I have plenty of thoughts on how to do that but they'll have to wait for another post.