After I tweeted and facebooked my note about MetroCascade being live with its new design, Vikki Flawith signed up with us. That was a really nice gesture, especially since at this point we haven’t (yet!) rolled out additional features for signed-up users.

What I find particularly exciting about Vikki‘s sign-up is what it says about the power of social media. It’s a good indicator of how social media can help build local community,  and of course I hope (and expect) that it will inform MetroCascade, too.

Why does Vikki‘s sign-up say anything about social media’s power? Because even though we are Facebook friends and follow each other’s tweets, and even though we both live in Victoria (probably not that far from one another, either), we have never actually met.

Yet Vikki is willing to engage via social media and is willing to say, “ok, I’ll give this MetroCascade a shot,” despite the fact that superficially these interactions look random or purpose-free. In other words, it would be relatively easy for her or anyone to dismiss the interaction, to say “there’s nothing in it for me, so…”

I don’t think they are at all random or purpose-free, however; they instead indicate how people-to-people communication is changing the media landscape. We’ve been used to broadcast media – the newspaper telling us the news, the TV stations giving us the entertainment or news (or infotainment), the print magazines determining the trends.

All of this has been changing for a long time now. And I’d like to see how sites like ours (and others in Victoria) can work to change even our famously fractured city, with its 13 local governments.

If you think about it, the 13 local governments are also an instance of broadcast control – with our Capital Regional District government as an overriding broadcaster. If you check the voter turnout, you’ll see that there’s very little enthusiasm for local government and elections, just as the enthusiasm for newspapers and television has declined, too.

The plastic broadcaster, the unsigned newspaper editorial (authoritative, but authorless, authoritative, but anonymous), the plastic politician with interchangeable boilerplate statements, faceless bureaucrats, unaccountable (but overcompensated) CEOs… None of this inspires us.

The inauthenticity staggers us. I’m reminded of Gertrude Stein’s judgment of a place she left behind: “There is no there there.” She settled instead in a place that had lots of “there,” and it was created by people.

Broadcast is dying, although it’s not clear what’s taking its place. Whatever it is, though, people will be at its core.

- Yule Heibel