I left the cushy land of collegiate bliss and jumped into a jump into a job in an IT department. It wasn’t until I pulled my head out of the techy-steeped sand and finally started my career as a writer that I saw the world through a less binary lens. Shock of shocks and trumpets from the sky: working with developers all day long, becoming steeped in bloggy culture, and doing a little freelance web development on the side skewed my view of how the rest of the world looks at the internet and technology in general.

After being bashed over the head with said trumpets I was forced to stop being so cynical about the TV shows that just didn’t get the whole new media world (*cough* Quarterlife) and stop the potentially blinding eye rolls when explaining a blog to someone. Actually listening to people talk about the internet (people from every demographic out there) reminded me that even in 2008 there are a lot of people who use the internet but still see it as this multinational foreign land where we all speak Geeklish…. and that’s ok. Even folks in advertising, marketing, public relations, and sales who are getting paid to work with or in new media don’t really understand it fully. I also saw (with my own two eyes) that it isn’t just Grandma Ethel or Sally in sales who see it as a nice place to visit but not to live. While interaction is growing among that oh so coveted 18-24 demographic, outside of Facebook you can still hear crickets.

Keeping it fair and balanced with a good old “I suck, you suck,” I realized I am responsible for the fact that as lurver and member of the crazy, nebulous new media I am responsible for acting as an advocate, and for doing what I can to make new media (like all other forms of mass communication) ubiquitous. Like every.single.other thing in this world, people won’t understand new media until it they really see a feature/benefit relationship and can tie it into their offline lives. As long as members of new media continue to try to make it an elite club that only early adopters understand or benefit from it will stay this nebulous thing… and will fizzle… and will fade. As fun as it can seem, mass communication can’t be all back-woods incestuous and survive – it is counter intuitive.

Everyone is screaming about the death of the publishing industry, but at this pace dancing on it’s grave is presumptuous and waaayyy premature. Sure advertising dollars are drying up, but money is drying up everywhere. Vera Wang and Betsy Johnson canceled their shows for Fashion Week for crying out loud. When the money isn’t out there for any medium, you have to believe that failing and collapse comes from another source. Online advertising space isn’t being sold either, and click through rates aren’t what people thought they would be but the failure rates aren’t nearly as large because no moolah isn’t compounded with decades of malfunction. Online advertising is becoming noise to the user (even bad site design that looks like advertising gets ignored). A good old glossy spread is always going to be more effective when compared to a straight up ad that links through to a product or services splash page when the user doesn’t get any benefit or value from it.

I see it this way: online advertising has to morph into its own beast, it has to. I believe that when online advertising finally develops and becomes what it needs to in order to be effective, print and online media will be friends with benefits and make out under the bleachers. In the spirit of the deviant rocker chick that lives inside of me, I truly believe that if print pubs can ride out the storm their own ad money is going to come back and it won’t be at the demise of online revenues because the internets will have its own bank. To get that bank we have to first realize that to really be effective, online advertising has to engage and provide value – feature/benefit style (come on that is like advertising 101 minus 1). While the 18-24′s say they use the internet to “waste time” they are just like older demos that use it to “get work done” in that the time wasters give provide value and benefit through entertainment, laughs, passive tension release – all of those escapist behaviors that people use media for.

Okay, I am rambling and I am certainly willing to entertain a debate about suspending my blogging license for a BWS (blogging while stupid), but hey… its my blog, and despite that ad over there I’m not making any money off it so I can kind of say it anyway. So, this is what I think I have learned from 2008 – here’s to a rise in new media in 2009 and here is a double-clink to proving me wrong.

And I close my eyes and hit publish…