the big changes.
As far as I’ve seen, the internet makes a few major changes to human culture, and extrapolating from those tells us where the future is going.
Time and space bias are becoming less and less important. When and where no longer limit information, entertainment, communication or conversation. Any business model based on exploiting time and space bias, or enforcing time and space bias, is officially on deathwatch. Business based on making time and space bias entirely irrelevant will probably find an audience, and success.
Potentially everyone can publish. This doesn’t mean that everyone has an equal voice, but it does mean that people will learn the responsibility of their works. If your words, your ideas, are put in front of the world, you become responsible for them in a way you can’t be without an audience. People fear an audience because it forces evolution and improvement. People cherish an audience for the same reason.
Knowing about something is going to become less and less valuable, as information is rapidly becoming accessible from everyone, from everywhere. Knowing how to do something is going to remain essential, because skill requires more than information. Discovering information about something will always remain valuable.
If something exists, there is less and less resistance against it becoming ubiquitous. This is currently true of information, and will likely be true of physical creations in the coming decades.
These are all fairly obvious at this point; I’m not breaking any new ground by writing this. But I’m finding it next to impossible to come up with a recent world-changing development that isn’t explained by the logical progression of one of these factors.
If I’m doing something that doesn’t address or leverage one of these issues, I can usually do it better by asking myself why.
3 comments:
Solid post. I agree with what you're saying.
Web based texts can supply contextual flesh and blood. As you say, the accessibility increases so that know-how, or practical knowledge increases in value. This trend makes an individual's authentic voice more valuable as well. It would seem strange that in an age of social networking and the proliferation of apparently immanent personalities individuals would gain power but this is inevitable.
Subcultures rally around certain connective persons with specialized information and a pleasingly stylish way of communicating it. The virtual environments will harvest the good and burn the chaff.
I really agree with your last point. Too many people argue that content from virtual environments is meaningless, because much of it is sub-standard. But, I generally refuse to acknowledge any argument that has an unspoken assumption that people / readers are too stupid to tell good from bad.
Thanks for the comment.
I think those criticisms come from an authority issue. Digital media is so democratic right now and for a while now we've had a stratified print culture with big money publishers up top and underground xerox zines on the bottom. The quality and accessibility gives the big money product the stamp of truth and zines are limited by the flimsy homemade quality coupled with their low output.
Knock away those two principle features and couple that with the name recognition of the author and you see the present potential ascension of the blogger.
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