As attention fragments, so does power and cultural evolution
Written by amedeo on December 19th, 2007
Hazy, fumbling vision of the future #9,321:
- A single journalism organization covering many topics in a general fashion splits into many smaller journalism organizations, each specializing in a single topic and covering it in depth.
- Information holders in positions of power receive interview requests not from tens of general journalism organization but from hundreds or thousands serving small, highly informed and demanding audiences.
- More specialized information providers eventually meet the demand, but there is a long period of interview rejections (”Potholejournalist dot what? Audience of 500? Go away. I’m busy talking to citystreets.com or city.com.”)
- Extremely knowledgeable generalists who can aggregate and make individual, consumer-specific sense of an incredible array of specialized information in order to make life-enhancing decisions (for example, reduce the conclusions of 1,000 scientific studies to what I should eat for breakfast) grow in demand. Hire a personal journalist, anyone?
- The power of a mass of people united by common information fragments.
- Effecting change on a mass scale becomes more difficult, but specific, niche problems get solved more quickly.
- Life is good; life is bad.
