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Terry Wolfisch Cole may seem like an ordinary 40-year-old mom and Girl Scout troop leader, but her small-town Connecticut neighbors know the truth: She's one of the "Pod People." At the supermarket she wanders the aisles in a self-contained bubble, thanks to her iPod digital music player. Through those little white ear buds, Wolfisch Cole listens to a playlist mixed by her favorite disc jockey -- herself. "Deejay Terry" knows precisely which upbeat songs can keep her feet shuffling ahead during the dreary experience of shopping. "I try not to sing out loud, and I take the earphones off when I get to the deli counter or cash register," Wolfisch Cole says, but otherwise, she's sealed off in her own listening booth, signaling "do not disturb" to the outside world.At home, when the kids are tucked away, Wolfisch Cole often escapes to another solo media pod -- but in this one, she's transmitting instead of just receiving. On her computer web log, or "blog," she types an online journal chronicling daily news of her life (recipes, family updates, or "whatever floats my boat"), then shares it all with the Web. She has attracted a faithful audience who, she says, "seem to actually want to read that my kids threw up on the floor today. Who'd have thunk it?"
Wolfisch Cole -- who also gets her daily news customized off the Internet and whose digital video recorder (DVR) scans through the television wasteland to find and record shows that suit her tastes -- is part of a new breed of people who are filtering, shaping and even creating media for themselves. They are increasingly turning their backs on the established system of mass media that has provided news and entertainment for the past half-century. They've joined the exploding "iMedia" revolution, putting the power of media in the hands of ordinary people.
The tools of the movement consist of a bubbling stew of new technologies that include iPods, blogs, podcasts, DVRs, customized online newspapers, and satellite radio. All are being embraced by a public increasingly hungry for media control. A new study by Arbitron has found that 27 million Americans now own one or more on-demand media devices such as an iPod or a DVR. And it's not just techies or teenage nerds joining the fray: Arbitron's senior vice president Bill Rose says the study shows that the appeal of do-it-yourself media is already crossing demographic lines and will continue to spread.
Devotees of iMedia run the gamut from the 89-year-old New York grandmother, known as Bubby, who has taken up blogging to share her worldly advice (her motto: "Everything you are going through, I already did"), to 11-year-old Dylan Verdi of Texas, who has started broadcasting her own homemade TV show or "vlog," for video web log, covering topics that include breaking news on her braces. In between are countless iMedia enthusiasts like Rogier van Bakel, 44, of Maine, who blogs at night, reads a Web-customized news page in the morning, travels with his fully loaded iPod and comes home to watch whatever the DVR has chosen for him. Everything is filtered according to his interests, which include libertarianism, songs by the art-rock band Kaiser Chiefs, and anything involving the Belgian cartoon character Tintin.
If the old media model was broadcasting, this new phenomenon might be called ego-casting, says Christine Rosen, a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a research institute. The term fits, she says, because the trend is all about me-me-media -- "the idea is to get exactly what you want, when and where you want it."
Rosen and others trace the beginnings of the iMedia revolution to the invention of the TV remote, which marked the first subtle shift of media control away from broadcasters and into the hands of the average couch potato. It enabled viewers to vote with their thumbs -- making it easier to abandon dull programs and avoid commercials. With the proliferation of cable TV channels in the late 1980s followed by the mid-1990s arrival of the Internet, controlling media input wasn't just a luxury. "Control has become a necessity," says Bill Rose. "Without it, there's no way to sort through all the options that are becoming available."
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