Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing.

I love that last line about magpie readers.

I can see the problem, but I think it’s about discipline. Avoid multi-tasking.

If you’re going to read books (and you should) or even long articles; you need to switch off the devices and focus.

Don’t worry, twitter will still be there – or something even crazier will have replaced it.

Journalists often over-estimate how much they know, and exaggerate their own importance.

But they’re not alone in having those shortcomings.

Where you sit is where you stand.

And people in different sectors of our complex democracy are quick to identify and lampoon the failings of everyone else.

Journalists ridicule academics for being long-winded (and dull), academics ridicule the superficialities of journalistic analysis.

Public servants sometimes think everyone in business is a spiv of one sort or another, while in the private sector bureaucrats are seen as rule-loving tossers.

These warring groups are not always wide of the mark in their depictions of each other.

More recently, we have had another cleavage thrust upon us: bloggers versus journalists.

I was cheered by Stilgherrian’s first few paragraphs in his paper to the media 140 conference. And this sentence, in particular:

This is why I think the whole bloggers versus journalists debate was and still is so incredibly stupid.

But what follows, unfortunately, is a jaunty run through the whole ’social media good, journalism bad’ story that has long since become a cliche.

A few more pars into this tour through the well-worn world of blogger resentment, we get this stunner of a summation:

Up the other end we’ve got big institutions like the Church, Science and The Media constructing narratives they call, respectively, Belief, Knowledge and News. All of them, when threatened, refer to their narratives as “The Truth”.

Oh dear.

Now I know Stig is trying to be entertaining and provocative so a certain amount of latitude is warranted.

But this sort of glibness doesn’t do anyone any good.

On the other hand, reading further I realised that this ‘critique of western civilisation in a nutshell’ really is the key to understanding the perspective of Stig and countless other social media romantics.

Folks, there is not such thing as truth. That was all a pre-digital idea. Now utterly redundant.

Once you get over silly obsessions like trying to work out what the truth is then you are free in Stig’s grand vision for our future to convey gossip along ant-like trails.

I’m not making this up.

At the end, in his paper’s coup de grace against the pretensions of journalists, Stig draws on a recent weather event to portray the redundancy of journalism:

Like ants mapping out food trails, people did this by passing signals to each other — interesting photos and factoids and emotional responses — without central control. And because they knew the people they passed them to, these messages had plenty of personal resonance.

When the industrial media factories creaked into action, maybe only minutes or an hour later, what were they adding to that process? Were they just packaging that collective narrative for the folks who aren’t yet connected to the live global hive mind?

Well there you go. No need for investigation, fact-checking, objective standards of accuracy, background, context. Not to mention a trained editorial hand to bring you the best writing and pictures.

I think we need more journalists.

I think more bloggers (and god forbid twitterers) should be embracing the skills of journalism.

I vote for excellence.

And truth.

I don’t want the ‘global mind hive’.

It sounds ugly and dystopian to me.

• Mainstream. The yes or no debate is over, its now about how. Social media is here and its important that we understand it and use it or respond to it in ways that are consistent with our corporate objectives. So social media should be in every comms strategy even if we consider it and decide not to use it or not to use it much

The Obama campaign is the current gold standard of this approach – they controlled message but they allowed people a great deal of lattitude in the way they helped promote that message

• Scalability. MySpace is dead, lost its cool. Facebook is too mainstream to be cool for kids anymore and Twitter is very limited. The more people using something, the more chaotic and junky it becomes.

• Nothing is dying. Media is fragmenting. Big media is still big media but there is more of it, more of it is delivered over the Internet and more of it has a participatory component. A fragmenting media means we as communicators have to get in front of people through a range of media. But radio will be here for a long-time, so will TV and so will newspapers.

• Content will be king, again. Especially content that actually contains new and important facts. Conversation is fine but it’s better if it’s informed. We’ve seen an explosion in opinion outlets. Crikey, the punch, national times, ABC unleashed. I don’t think business is using these outlets effectively. But opinion is great and can be important and entertaining, what is harder to do and costs more is the generation of facts – business and non-government organisations are well-positioned to help feed this need. But we’re not doing much of it yet.

This is important in a country where very few large organisations do.

So full marks for effort.

No doubt, Telstra’s re-entry into the fledgling field of corporate social media will be generally applauded within the small band of people who care passionately about this stuff.

But looking at Telstra’s new blog, called, in best marketing speak, Telstra exchange, I can’t help feel a little sad and a little more convinced that big corporates and social media don’t really mix – well, maybe a little bit, maybe as a little superficial gloss on the dull, besuited hearts of the corporate world.

Edgy, it’s not.

I guess this new approach is consistent (or ‘aligned’ in suit-speak) with Telstra’s new more co-operative approach to government and media relations.

Getting along with people is generally the best strategic approach, but it often makes for less interesting copy.

And the new blog was launched on a day when Telstra had to backflip on a PR disaster – a fee to pay your bill.

The media release on the backflip contained this wonderful example of the PR genre:

“I have listened to the community debate and believe that the way we introduced the fee did not align with our commitment to put customers back at the heart of our business,” Mr Thodey said.

“It is now clear to me that introducing this fee across our existing plans was the wrong way to encourage customers to move to electronic payments.

“We designed the fee in a way that exempted more than a million elderly, pensioners and disadvantaged people but it was still unacceptable to many of our customers.

Well, I guess that’s better than just saying ‘we got it wrong’ or ‘it was the wrong thing to do’.

Earlier today I linked to some musings by Steve Rubel about the blending of media and social media to the point that they are now the one and the same thing.

I think this is true, or will soon be true, of corporate communications.

Your social media effort will only be as good as your overall comms approach.

There’s not much point trying to get a social media fig leaf to cover up an unchanged culture where nothing is ever wrong, it just doesn’t ‘align’ sometimes.

Still, Telstra are having a go and that puts them ahead of just about every other big organisation in Australia.

And, it’s unfair to be too critical. I just wish..

Five years ago there was media and social media and the two were distinct. You know what was what. It was like there elephants and zebras. You knew the difference.

Today all media is social, all social is media. It’s impossible to separate the two.

The media all actively use social technologies to innovate, converse and collaborate with their audiences. Meanwhile, social content from friends – be it tweets or status updates or videos – all should be considered media. Yes, the elephants and the zebras have cross-mated.

Social media has become far more important in the past five years. Is it still as exciting – probably not. A road less traveled loses some of its appeal when the 4WD (SUV) crowd start their a/c’d, DVD’ed, leather upholstered pilgrimages.

Anyway, I would have missed this great anniversary had it not been for John Cass who interviewed me on his blog to mark the occasion this week. So thanks John. The interview is reposted below.

Some others have also blogged to mark the occasion, including AgWired, Bastien Beauchamp, Tom Murphy, and Colin McKay.

So here’s the interview:

John: What was the significance of the Global PR Blog Week for you?

Trevor: It was fun and it helped demonstrate how people could come together online and create a body of mostly good quality material on line. Most of all I think it helped to counter some of the “PR is dead” stuff that was popular around that time, which originates from a false (IMO) view that PR is only about spin when PR done well is mostly about good communications. People (eg Naked Conversations) sometimes like to think that if only PR got out of the way then communications in our society would automatically improve. That’s a bit like Reagan’s “government is the problem not the solution” statement. It’s simplistic and wrong-headed. The real challenge is to make PR better, and social media will help, is helping, to do that.

John: As one of the organizers of the conference what did it take to organize the conference, what do you recall about the event from your perspective?

Trevor: I basically came up with the initial concept and contacted a bunch of people to participate. This was easy because there was only about two dozen PR bloggers in the world at that stage (now there seem to be countless thousands), and most responded to my email within hours and were keen to participate. Most of the real hard work was done by Constantin Basturea who is now at Converseon in NYC. He did all the website stuff, which I can’t do. Constantin deserves most of the credit for making it happen. Today, with twitter and facebook etc PR blogweek would have been far more interactive – the technical challenges were greater back then. Constantin’s work meant we were able to do the whole thing without cost to the user – a bit like the Bloggercon idea – and that made it far more accessible.

John: What were the lasting effects of the Global PR Blog Week?

Trevor: The NewPR wiki that Constantin set up after PR blogweek partly as a way of storing the material was a very valuable resource for a lot of people. Anecdotally, I think a lot of people were encouraged to start blogging or to get more committed by the examples they saw in PR blogweek

John: How did the Global PR Blog week influence you and the industry?

Trevor: I think it helped to point to, or confirm, that PR could embrace social media and get real benefits from it. But it was a conference, and there have been many others. It was of its time when PR blogging was embryonic to say the least. I made contact with some great people like Constantin, Steve Rubel, Neville Hobson, and more and that was great fun and taught me a lot about PR in other parts of the world.

John: Reviewing the post(s) you wrote for the Global PR Blog week what has changed? What has not changed, since you wrote the post?

Trevor: Social media has grown rapidly much as we anticipated back then, but the rise of twitter, youtube and facebook have all been a surprise to me. Many of these services are far more accessible to users than blogs. Blogging tends to be a bit high end. Blogs that survive and do well over a period of years need to produce great content consistently and regularly and that’s hard work. I find it difficult to blog and do everything else I want to do in life, as do many others – social media provides an easier way to stay in contact.

The media has adopted social media to a large extent and is promoting it heavily. Can that save big media – well some of it, but there is still going to be an almighty rationalisation especially in regard to newspapers. Nevertheless, I find the continuing “blogging versus journalism ” debate so tedious. Bloggers are not journalists, and only a few want to be. Just as boring is the “social media can do everything” line that passionate advocates sometimes push. No-one believes it in the real world. Your client is interested in how social media fits in and adds value to the existing comms strategy. Few clients listen to the ’social media can revolutionise everything’ hokey. I was more naive back then, a few years of trying to sell the social media idea to clients has toughened me up on this point. I stopped doing media interviews a while ago because the journalists always wanted you to either say something alarmist about social media (identity theft etc) or they wanted a cookie cutter evangelist to say something simplistic and naive.
In my view, we’ll be there when we lose the media / PR construct and just communicate. Media would add value principally by selecting and packaging great stuff for a mass audience. PR would be the people in your organisation that facilitate but don’t actually do the communicating. The roles of journalist and blogger would be in the background, and the real business of communicating would be in the foreground. We’re still a long way off.

John: Give an update on what you’ve been doing in the last five years, and what you are doing now?

Trevor: In the last couple of years I’ve changed direction a bit and while I still do some PR work, I’m back at university researching a Phd on Australian politics and teaching, most recently in a course on Australian Foreign and Defence Policy. I still blog a little bit and I’ve written a lot of articles for Australian online media sites. I’m on twitter and I enjoy Facebook because a lot of my real world family and friends use it.

John: Thanks Trevor for coming up with the original ideas, helping to organize the conference and a great interview.

Postscript: On ABC AM this morning the interviewer suggested to Wayne Swan that he wasn’t answering her question. Swan promptly, and revealingly, responded that was because she wasn’t asking the right question! As I said, we’ll tell you what we want to tell you, when and how we want to tell you. Plus ca change etc

Says (spuiks?) Lee:

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