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There was once a time, not very long ago, when the power the media held over the common man was as far reaching as the Roman Empire. With a flick of their golden quills, they had the ability to bewitch the masses into packing out cinemas across the country, and the unyielding influence to make novels fly off the shelves and onto every man, woman and child’s bedside table. However, thanks to our very own rebellious leader, the social media revolutionary Che Zuckerberg, we are now able for the first time to storm the gates of the cultured brethren and challenge their omnipotence by declaring “We shall not just eat the bloody cake”.

Please excuse my melodramatic description of this slight shift in power, because although it does signal, I hope, a move away from the decades of spoonfed information from the powers-that-be, the media are not going to go quietly into the night and are mounting their own counter-revolution.

Unless you have been living in the woods for the past year (perhaps planning your own guerilla campaign) it has been difficult to escape the fanfare in the media surrounding The Social Network, David Fincher’s semi-fictionalized account of the founding of Facebook, and the overwhelming collective agreement that this is perhaps the best damn film any of them have ever seen.  It prompts one to wonder, then, why this seminal film of the decade has yet to break the $100 million mark at the box office and was only the 29th highest grossing film of the year.

Well, the bottom line is, we just aren’t paying as much attention to the media’s battle cry any more. Our world has been changed forever by the internet, particularly, in recent times, Social Media. Ironically people were more inclined to listen to what their ‘friends’ and ‘friends of friends’ had to say about The Social Network than the media juggernaut, which was endorsing a film about the very thing that may bring their world crashing down around them. Ah irony, don’t you just love it.

I believe this Musketeer approach of ‘all for one and one for all’ media attack will only heighten as they try and cling on to the power they had become accustomed too, hoping that by collectively backing the same horse, they will blindside Joe Public into believing that their life will indeed not be worth living without succumbing to their mass message.

The real beauty however, that I believe lies in this social media revolution, is the breakdown of information asymmetry which has been prevalent in our global society for far too long.  To quote Wikipedia:
“In economics and contract theory, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

A world where we all have the power to make decisions based on an even share of information and the opportunity to broadcast our own views and opinions is the kind of place I want to live in, don’t you? Viva La Revolucion!