In the modern age of top-down media management in the Premier League, Twitter is a rare place where communication from players to fans is direct rather than mediated; that is part of the fun.
These developments are not the democratic panacea cyber utopians sometimes pretend they are, but they are a vast improvement over the top-down media models of the past, where the audience was relegated to the role of passive consumer.
Moreover, for new bands such as Arctic Monkeys and Kings of Leon, social networking Web sites were crucial to the way in which audiences could be built from the bottom up, initial enthusiasm spreading by word of mouth rather than by top-down media campaigns.
It's the industrial top-down media of the last 150 years, Standage told me, that is the historical anomaly.
But I'm the first to admit that this shift away from a centralized, top-down media towards a decentralized bottom-up media did not come without a cost.
I have made, quite literally, "a billion dollars," which, as I'm constantly reminded by the media, is "cool". But I'm the first to admit that this shift away from a centralized, top-down media towards a decentralized bottom-up media, did not come without a cost.
"Young people respond strongly to face-to-face campaigning, not top-down media messages," he said.
Disciplined, top-down, media-savvy, Ivy League-staffed organizations started mobilizing — the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal.
All of those subcultures came through at a time when young people were wildly underrepresented in the media, where top down, old-fashioned institutions tried to dictate the culture of the day.
While businesses have plenty of options if they want to push their employees to do more social media sharing, CultureSphere founder and CEO Danny Gordon said the existing tools all take a similar "top down approach" — senior marketing and social media executives decide what's worth sharing, then everyone else just shares it, or doesn't.
These approaches emerged from an era dominated by top-down broadcast media.
