I do not feel old.

I can’t predict the weather based on whether my joints hurt.  I can eat a hunk of jalapeno cornbread on my way upstairs to bed, and still fall fast asleep.  I’ve never been to The Scooter Store (although I have been to a taping of The Price Is Right—twice, actually).

But when I think about how different the communications landscape is today—compared to when I started my career—it’s scary to think of how old I really am.

After graduating in…let’s just say, the early 80’s…my first “professional” gig was hosting the morning talk show at WALE Radio—a last-place-in-the-ratings, 1,000-watt AM station in Fall River, MA. (FYI: A 1,000-watt station transmits a staticky signal that covers a radius of maybe 10 square miles.  That’s hardly even “broad-”casting.)   (By way of comparison, the last hair dryer I owned—back in the days when I still needed one—was 1,250 watts.)

My first assignment, barked at me by now-long-deceased Program Director Dick Kingman (fake radio name, to go along with his fake radio hairpiece), was to run down to the stationery store and re-stock the newsroom’s supply of carbon paper.

You heard me. Carbon paper.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the differences between “then” and “now.” At CEC, one of our primary responsibilities is to constantly monitor the latest trends in the ongoing evolution of our profession.  But we’ve been learning that you have to be very careful when making grand proclamations about “what’s new,” ‘cause it’s too tempting to focus on the wrong things.

Since you can now walk into an internet cafe in Abu Dhabi and upload onto YouTube the streaming video you shot on a camera the size of a deck of cards…and a minute later people can watch it on their iPhones while riding the Heathrow Express—it’s easy to conflate the changes in the technology of communications, with the changes in communication behaviors.

In fact, the biggest changes between “then” and “now” aren’t technical, they’re sociological.

People today behave differently, gravitating toward forms of communication that include them—that are actually about them.  (All hail Facebook!)  People don’t want to be “just the audience” anymore (as opposed to when they just didn’t want to be the audience of WALE Radio).

Communications in the classic sense—creating a perfect message and pushing it to whatever group you’re trying to reach—is quickly becoming an archaic, “old man” notion.  How we should measure our success is no longer about “how many people heard us speak” or “how much media pick-up did we get.”

To be successful in this environment, we need to develop ideas that people will want to absorb and then retransmit on their own.  We need to enable people to advocate on our behalf (so it isn’t always us pushing the message)…and give them the tools and empowerment to turn our ideas into their own thoughts and words in their own way.

We don’t need—and shouldn’t want—people to just repeat exactly what we’re broadcasting from corporate headquarters, in a verbatim carbon copy of the way we said it.

‘Cause even if that’s what we DID want, there’s no way to make carbon copies any more. The stationery store where they used to sell carbon paper went out of business.  Now it’s an internet cafe.

How about YOU? What do you think are the biggest differences in communications today, compared to when you started your career?