I am speaking to an association in Iowa next week on leadership, and a couple of the themes I'll be talking about are (a) how fast things change these days, and, somewhat related, (b) how social media is changing the game in general. And it's not about the number of people on Facebook or how many followers Oprah has. It's about more important change in behavior and some important shifts in what we value.

For example, take a look at Maddie's post earlier this week about some interesting dynamics about some bloggers that were compensated (free registration) at an MPI event. One of the issues is whether the bloggers would be "objective" in their coverage of the event. Some pushed back arguing that it is the very subjective nature of blogging that is valuable–what you are reading is (unapologetically) from the blogger's perspective.

It made me think that perhaps there is a big shift going on. Obviously, there is value in objective coverage of news. But that value USED to be a lot more, precisely because we were limited to such a small number of news sources. With social media, I am constantly being delivered news from a large number of (admittedly subjective) sources. Some of them are more objective than others, but because I get a large number, I can usually interpret through the aggregate what's "objectively" going on. 

I think about the earthquake that hit DC a couple of weeks ago. It was (thankfully) so small, that when it happened, I didn't know what it was. When I got on Twitter, I figured it out. I never turned on the TV to look to an "objective" news source to tell me what was happening, though I did visit NOAA's site. But that was just to get interesting details. Many of the objective facts were discernible through the collective tweets I could read. If someone had given me a very subjective and inaccurate report that there was catastrophic damage, for example, I would have discounted it in the face of all the other tweets.

Maybe I'm overplaying this example, but I wonder if the objective truth is easier to get these days, simply because we have access to so many more individual data points. We don't need the authoritative objective source as much as we used to. We just need access to more of a "crowd" of subjective ones. In that context, the subjective can become more valuable than it used to be. Knowing that I will get at the objective in the big picture, I can now listen more carefully to the beauty and insight of subjective interpretations. I can expand the boundaries of what I can learn. I can see opportunity where I used to see messiness. 

What is "valuable" seems to be morphing a lot these days. Is it still as important as it used to be for associations to be the authoritative source of information? Something to think about. 

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