Is anyone listening?

Participation is the buzzword of all marketers these days. Social media has revolutionised the way people communicate - from being talked at, to having conversations with. PR is no longer one way, and it's no longer controlled. Anyone can bitch about a bad experience they had with your brand online, and anyone can recommend it. Newspapers are dying because people no longer trust the motives of large corporations with controlled and edited content but would rather read the opinions of their peers, their friends and themselves.

But perhaps newspapers are dying not because of some grand or noble democratisation of the publishing model, but because technology has enabled us to be more self-involved than ever. There are hundreds of new bloggers every day, but are there hundreds of new readers? In our quest for the Warholian fifteen minutes of fame we rant and pontificate and lose ourselves in endless and self-important navel-gazing. We seek only to be heard and not to hear. The conversation is just as one-way as it's ever been: the direction has simply reversed.