A neat run-down on Kuro5hin of Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman’s online book ‘We Media‘, which studies the rise of participatory media on the web (blogs, messageboards, groups etc.).

One key idea that I took from the article (I haven’t read the whole online book) is that new generations of media consumers will demand interactivity from their news media, mixing and matching media sources and feeding new perspectives back into the discussion, and that the idea of sitting down with a newspaper will feel like attending a Monash University Electrical Engineering lecture – boring and pointless.

Futurist Paul Saffo calls this entertaining interactivity “particitainment“, in an impressive example of what analyst-watchers call “wordulation”.

I like it. Bring it on. Show me an interactive map of the world which highlights news flashpoints and lets me quickly tie together related threads depending on my personally tuned trust network. Then let me feed data back in to the “map” based on my own perspective and experience. Then I’ll be happy.