Monday, March 12, 2007

Impact of Mobile as the Mass Media to China: BIGGER than in industrialized world

I believe China will be the best place to prove how mobile phone can overtake the legacy mainstream mass media, which were controlled tightly by the government.

If you travel to China , you will sense the power of Internet and Mobile as mass media that give back the expression right to people and how that will change the entire world.

Even though the government is trying its best to censor both the Internet, I believe people's creative power, the one that Chinese people never had before, had empowered the people of china through new technology to make revolutionary changes in every possible aspect in their lives, from economics to politics.

Can you imagine if 1/5 of the world's population has the freedom to express them with their mobile phone??? Wouldnt this be great???

I believe the young Asians will overtake the sluggish European and America in adopting mobile media for businesses.

So yes, for whatever impact the emergence of mobile as the NEXT mass media channel can have to the industrialized world, the impact will be much greater in countries like China where there is not a strong entrenched legacy media. Where mobile often emerges as the "first" mass media. And then the role of simple SMS text messaging alone is probably as revolutionary as the American Revolution 250 years ago when they were influenced by the printing press and the precursor to the modern newspaper: the printed pamphlet.

But where China really "trumps" the whole NEXT Mass Media opportunity is its lead in versus the PC based internet. China became the third country after Japan and South Korea where more internet users access via mobile than PC. But where in South Korea and Japan we have very advanced digital societies with very advanced (and free) legacy mass media, in China for the majority of internet users, their ONLY access is mobile and that is also typically the only relatively free mass media channel.

This is the year for Chinese mass media - through Mobile. The year of the Golden Pig. The year of the Bond. The year of the 300. The year of Chinese Mobile Media. This is a cool time for me to live in Shanghai, China.

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