The future will always suck more than now. Ludwig Boltzmann had that fact inscribed on his tombstone.

I'm inclined to agree with your analysis, Jon, but I'm curious to consider that similar events have happened before. Printing press, Protestant Reformation, end of feudal power structures, hm.....

Our blogs aren't very powerful yet, but they gain power daily. We reach people who just didn't know what was happening. They viewed/read the MSM and thought they knew.

They will learn. They'll see the blogs as a source of honest, undiluted info and they'll realise the MSM has fed them pablum with no substance.

Oh yes. The future will suck more than now, but not for long.

Printing press, Protestant Reformation, end of feudal power structures, hm...

Exactament. Imagine the difference in mindset between people who never even IMAGINED they'd be able to read the Bible themselves and simply assumed they'd always have to have priests explain it to them -- compared to later generations who TOOK IT FOR GRANTED they could read the Bible and interpret it themselves.

I believe and hope people younger than us will be almost unable to believe there was a time when you couldn't easily read every book ever published; when governments could kill 3,000 demonstrators and not be terrified millions of cell phone pictures of the carnage would instantly appear online; when ordinary people with no resources couldn't make a movie and have it be instantly available to everyone on earth; and so on.

If people look back at us and believe we were moral barbarians, we will have done something right.

there's always the megalomaniacs who will take breakthroughs and turn them around to be destructive(anthrax for example)... but then the whole internet was conceived in ARPANET, a mainly military project. maybe the internet is the secret plan to destroy the world, i don't know, but it's gonna be a fun ride

the whole internet was conceived in ARPANET, a mainly military project. maybe the internet is the secret plan to destroy the world

I often suspect the Pentagon looks at the internet and thinks: man, this isn't working out like we anticipated.

Disagree. The Pentagon didn't have A Huge Evil Military Plan for Teh Arpanet, they just chucked some bucks (chump change compared to their budget) at a bunch of geeks who had an interesting-sounding project. Much more of the development was funded by the NSF (in fact most of it was still called NSFNET up to '94)

As far as their own use of internetworking goes, they found it was working out so much like they anticipated that they transferred all the other DOD computer networks into TCP/IP in 1983, and the DOD NIC has (I think) the biggest single allocation of IP addresses.

I agree that in and of themselves, web-based technologies of personal expression are a GOOD THING. But as we know already, this ups the ante with regard to participation: after all, there's that much more amateur and professional propaganda to fight against (a thousand points of dark?), that many more ways for public discourse to spiral into a rat hole. More information doesn't equal enlightenment; the fax machine didn't bring down the Soviet Union.

Interesting argument, which makes sense. Does not having my own blog, but still wasting far too much time reading blogs mean I am still a consumer?

One caveat, though:

What if your own version of "freakiness" means not a political belief or odd religion, but an honest belief that in real! real! life you are not a 30 year old living in your mother's basement but a DRAGON or a WARRIOR ELF? Or, if you believe that the Illuminati control everything? Or, your only sexual response is to someone in a homemade fur suit? Before, these folks were marginalized-now they can find each other, and their unhealthiness can be strengthened. (And, I'm sorry, believing you really are a Gryphon is unhealthy)

Just saying the new world is not all good. But, of course, you knew that :)

Sorry for this copout, but I don't like to think. It makes my head hurt and can only lead to misery, unhappiness and any number of even less jolly circumstances.

BKM, fabulation and aggressive confabulation are certainly facilitated by web tech, as are all sorts of reprehensible activities. But they're still marginal, unless they have the support of the state, are money makers or can be done in the name of God.

Yes, yes, it will be wonderful, but I always have a question--who will pay for us to do the reporting? Not the pap, digested or fresh, or the freak to get on or let shrivel, but the actual digging up of facts and information? It takes time and resources to call people up, harass them, send in FOIA forms, have an internet connection to get documents, actually run around and look at things. Breaking that task up so that it can only be done in a hobbyists spare time slows it down and dilutes it. Before journalism was remotely working class it was aristocratic or church-fed leisure--young lord, monks, and adventurers wandering about and writing up their travels because they felt like it. (De Toqueville, Marco Polo). It's only when people started paying to read those travelogues that people without income-granting estates and shops could follow their passion and write for a living without taking a vow of celibacy and service.

Let's just assume that ad-sales are bad, either b/c they're evil or because they're simply disappearing anyway. I don't know about you, but I don't want to take a vow of celibacy or obedience. I could try to sponge off of someone else's high-paying job, as I have in the past, but I'd rather not, and sugary consorts are harder to come by these days anyway. I'm not saying this to be sarcastic or contradictory. I'm honestly curious. How can we get people to pay for the labor and non-paper resources that goes into digging out and analyzing information? Is there a way to reliably get people to pay for consuming information without giving them the paper token of that consumption?

Jonathan & Jonathan, can one of you please tell me the name of that promising ad-free news service you've both linked to? No key word is coming to mind. Thanks!

What if, by some *very* complicated, *very* sensitive formula, a fraction of EVERYBODY'S ISP fees were parcelled out to 'content providers' in a way that was proportional to the number of 'page views' a site enjoyed, the site providers' commercial/noncommercial 'status', scientific/cultural/artistic 'relevance', etc. & etc...

ASCAP Payment System: Royalty Calculation
http://www.ascap.com/about/payment/royalties.html

The question will the future be better rests on the problem of getting people interested in politics. I became fascinated with the blogoshpere because it dealt with the reality of politics which does affect us all in very real ways. However an inordinate segment of the population has no interest in politics and they continue to get their news on the five second blurbs of their local TV news which is the worst source for news possible. In fact it is much more like entertainment than news.

People who bother to take time to read blogs or participate are people who were essentially interested in a good source for news and politics to begin with. I didn't even know about blogs or what a blog was until one day reading a Molly Ivins column over at creators.com Molly Ivins gave Josh Marshall a good plug. I was curious and went to Josh's website and at first did not know what to think but I was soon drawn into what he was doing. I enjoyed his analysis and the links to important articles in online news media sources. I soon realized I could be much better informed then if I just read the local papers or watched the News Hour on PBS.

Now a lot of people seem to think that corporations are evil by nature but I disagree with this. Corporations are neither good nor bad, their sole purpose is to make a profit and in doing so employ a lot of people. The problem with corporations is not if they are good or bad the problem is when they become deregulated and are allowed to have too much power and influence in the government. The conservative wing-nuts complain about regulation as do libertarians even though it is just as bad for them as everyone else. This deregulation is the true source for corruption in government and it is the people in government who allow this to happen and they should be held accountable. Deregulation is the source of the lousy main stream news media. After WWII there were a great deal more independent news outlets than there are now. What we see now are news monopolies that have little competition and have become fawning ass kissers to the bullies in the Whitehouse who are in turn fawning ass kissers to the deregulated corporations. It is a vicious circle and while right now the internet provides us with an alternative to main stream news the real question is will it always remain so. Newspapers, magazines, television and radio, with a few exceptions, have all fallen in line with the stranglehold large corporations have on them and the government so is there any reason to believe that the internet will be any different?

Right now the internet is being handed over to AT&T and Verizon and they are already talking about controlling the internet in ways I think most of us would object too. The only way to keep the internet as a freewheeling source of information is to get more people interested in participating in politics yet when less than half of the country cannot even be bothered to vote in major elections this becomes problematical. So I think the answer is if things are allowed to continue as the do today the future will suck even more than things suck today.

I just depressed the hell out of myself.

I've been having the same discussions recently. Mainly from a generational perspective.
I've decided to join MC Lars in calling the myspace generation the iGeneration due to the unprecedented impact of the Internet and user friendly (often iPod, iTunes, etc.) technologies that enable it.
I've also thought as this new generation as the My Generation and the Why Generation.
There is an emerging self-awareness in this generation. We text instead of call, instant message instead of email, wear upiquodous white headphones to shut out the world. At the same time, however, we expose ourselves to the world and to each other on Myspace.
The Internet has made it possible for anybody to make it big and to explore new ways of communication and constructing our ideas of the world.
But who will speak for this movement? Who will be their leaders? Tom from Myspace? Maybe Al Gore in 2008?

Has anyone considered that the explosion of self expression means that we'll have to learn Mandarin, Malayalam, Spanish or Hindi to participate in anything more than a little corner of it?

If, as you put it, we are all becoming producers of media rather than audience, why would Chinese bloggers, naturally writing for their national audience, bother writing in English? All the biggest US blogs are exactly that - US blogs.

There are no global blogs.

So, with the explosion of cultural production that is happening throughout the world, we need to realise that individual cultural production will increasingly be local or national in focus. It will be in Chinese, or other national languages, and while the English-speaking world will continue to produce culture, it will pale by comparsion of volume.

Any bets as to the number of daily hits the Spanish or Tamil Atrios (or Instapundit) will get?

English will remain the language of business, politics and science, but an explosion of content producers, as opposed to consumers, means that new media will inevitably reflect the languages and worldviews of those who use it.

Look at the Old Media case - Hollywood sells 1.6 billion tickets every year. Bollywood sells 2.6 billion. Now, in the English speaking world Hollywood seems so culturally overwhelming.

But in a global sense it aint. Financially overwhelming maybe, although this is slipping quite quickly. But culturally not so much.

The emerging New Media will be no different.

In answer to Saheli's earlier question of:
...who will pay for us to do the reporting?
and Jonathon and Rob's discussion of Saheli's further question,
How can we get people to pay for the labor and non-paper resources that goes into digging out and analyzing information?
the answers are simple, and are really the same thing.

Hollywood, and most of the MSM are finding out the same thing right now, when it comes to content. You can throw crap against a wall, and SOME of it will always stick. But if you want to make a big haul (as corporations ALWAYS do), with the smallest investment, you have to employ people who TRULY know what the fuck they're doing - and then back the fuck off and let them do it.

The problem, as corporate America sees it, is that the same individuals who fit the above description ARE the keys to creating wide-ranging successful content - and with the advent of the internet, those talented people now also have many more ways, places, and employment fields to be involved in. (Or another way of looking at it, "It's hard to keep th' slaves down on the farm, when they've done gone and freed 'em, dammint!")

The REAL journalists, artists, writers, etc are now, more than ever, on the verge of becoming the ones with most of the power. At the same time, while the eight-eyed corporate cubicle monkeys that have also been the slavering, stupid horse-brained masses in the past, that fed their pap machines, are now - if they're not talented individuals - at least helping to undermine the precious corporate hierarchies and support the folks with real talent, due to the internet.

Those corporate leaders who are wise will let go of the reigns of power, hire the damn talented folk, and let the truly talented take their corporate businesses to places where new, innovative, unique and formerly uncommon ways of making money and providing solid, worthwhile content reign supreme.

Will that happen? Hard to say. But with the power shift the internet has given the truly talented (and even the complete nutjobs), the idea that the corporatized, effete, small-minded, ultra-rich will be able to drive the masses like cattle with little to no effort and huge payback for long periods of time is rapidly coming to an end. Even if the masses lose, the richies won't win either. The best they can hope for if they insist on trying to frame the universe in their old-fashioned, pre-"mass individual communication" way is a draw - and the worst is where they lose their arrogance, and damn near everything else they've ever had.

As for worrying about learning other languages? Don't bet on it, floopy. My brother, who has studied in China, and is now working in Germany can tell you - even in the smaller villages, they ALL learn English (some places obviously more throughly than in others). English is the language of business, and has become the defacto "common" throughout most of the world. While not everyone speaks it well, most everyone knows a bit of it - often more than enough to get by.

No one here, I believe, will disagree that it is good, right, and wise to know multiple languages. But all this talk in the MSM of "you may have to learn Chinese or Hindi to succeed grandly" is FUD. Think of it from their perspective - in India and China, where business is expanding, and people are becoming upwardly mobile at an extreme pace, what is the number one job qualification?

Speaking English.
Why?

Because from inside China or India, you don't think about reaching the 1/4 of the worlds population that is your current marketplace - you think of expanding to the other 3/4ths that are outside your current realm. And what language do the majority of potential customers speak, who have money and are willing to spend it with you?

English.

It's simple business - most bang for the buck, floopy. And right now - and likely for the next century, at least - that's not likely to change.

Follow the money. Still works.

If I can speak for Robert Putnam in this discussion, the future will suck because tech-based communication is no substitute for real, person-to-person organization that is required for communities to band together for change.

i.e., Thomas Paine's ability to write and distribute inspiring thoughts might have helped the American Revolution, but nothing would have happened if everybody sat in their homes and printed their own pamphlets. And Rush Limbaugh is just a blowhard lecturing lonely people in cars without the evangelical foot soldiers of the Religious Right fuelling a conservative takeover of this country church-by-church.

Tech or no tech, there's still no substitute for getting out there and organizing in person.

Silversmith - I'm an ESL teacher, and I've lived and worked in China and Laos for a number of years. I know all about the Chinese mania for English, but I also have been exposed to the rapidly expanding Chinese music and film scene. Britney Spears is facing pretty stiff competition.

I'm certainly not denying the importance of English for business and communication - simply saying if, in the beginning, much of the content in world media was produced in English, particularaly on the web. That is changing.

I know Lao colleagues who have been labouring to produce a simplified Lao font (to be distributed free) so they can produce content in Lao. They speak perfect English - but why wouldn't they want to produce a blog in Lao, about Lao music and pop culture, for other Lao young people? That is the essence of what we are talking about here - decentralising media production.

Hell, Laos just produced their first truly national pop star, who sings in Lao, as opposed to the more 'global' Thai. Laos is a tiny market of 4 million people, but they want their own star, singing in their language about their culture, and the emerging middle class has the money to cghoose to buy that as well as the lastest Britney Spears album.

Now extrapolate that to a rapidly emerging China and India.

Can't you see a connection between "Big media is starting to lose market share to individuals who can produce what they want for small specialist markets" and "Globalised English language media producers are starting to lose media share to producers who are producing for those specialised smaller markets"?

How popular do you think Thai metal is in Thailand? Mandarin heavy rock or punk in Beijing?

Of course people will still learn English (for business and global communication) but look forward to an explosion in multilingual media attuned to national markets - particularly on the net.

That's what decentralised media production is all about. It's also where the money is - a homogenised 'one size fits all' English media is going to continue fragmenting. Hollywood better get used to the idea.

"the whole internet was conceived in ARPANET, a mainly military project. maybe the internet is the secret plan to destroy the world"

I don't think so, any more than the wheel is a military invention used to destroy the world. Yes, there are wheels on tanks and wheels on big guns and wheels on bombers, but wheels are also used for a myriad of non-destructive purposes and, like internetworking, are an inevitable discovery.

("Hmmm, there's a network of computers over here, and another network over there, what if we connected the two?" is going to happen somewhere whether it's funded by the military or not. The engineering work required to make it reliable and scalable is non-trivial but also not beyond the grasp of many thousands of people in the field.)

ZisGuy, you take my comments far too seriously :)

having said that, you have to realize that any reasonably smart neanderthal or homo erectus can come up with a simple mechanical invention like the wheel or a lever or even a club. it took a few very very very very very clever computer scientists (Tim Berners-Lee and Co.) to make the web, which has been the killer app for the internet.

Nope. Ya still don't get it floopy.

Big business - whether in China, Laos, Japan, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, England, France, Brazil, America or frankly ANY damn place on the map - will still look at things this way;
***** "Well, four million Laotians listing to OUR version of Britney Spears is great. But the largest 'untapped market' for our new Laotian Britney speaks English. So... could she, um do the whole Shakira thing, and learn to speak English?"

In other words, floopmeister, you missed the point. Corporations work thusly: Least amount of input---->>>> Most amount of big fu*king piles of cash.

This usually follows by doing this: Find ONE successful thing, present it to the easiest, largest possible group of consumers. Repeat with with next largest group of same kind. Repeat ad nauseam. Remember, least amount of input, so do as little as is humanly possible to change the product, from group to group, as that would cost the company more resources.

Since there is such a large subset of people on the planet that speak English, find an artist who is the Laotian Britney (or make someone be that), and as long as they speak English, once they've conquered Laos, next stop - other nearby similar markets! If she conquers all of SE Asia, onto the English speaking world!

"Hollywood" understands this idea better than anyone on the planet. That's why even though Bollywood makes more films, Hollywood has more influence, and makes more $$$, in larger quantities. If you don't think American media companies aren't invested in media companies over in China and India, you'd better read more financial reports.

And over there - as it is here - sure, there'll be more individual media creation in the future. But the big $$$ - what you're laughingly denouncing with your comments - will STILL be made by the big boys.
And the "Big Boys" (which BTW, includes one of Japan's largest worldwide companies, Sony) are still, basically, part of the gigantic corporate media conglomerates you dismiss as "Hollywood."
They DO know what they're doing.
Arrogant? Hell yea. Ignorant sometimes? Hell yea.
But Stupid when it comes to the future of content creation possibilities regarding $$$$, by the REAL people behind the scenes, who REALLY have the $ and make the $ to make it all happen?!!

Not even in your best wet dreams, pilgrim.
The good news? Since there will be "new blood" in the media channels, - as far as those people who can both tell a story and reposition their reams of Asian and Indian stories for consumption by the western world, in a way that's more "natural" and pleasing to the Western cultural mores - it will likely mean better quality entertainment again, as new "storytellers" tell stories different from what Westerners have heard over and over again.

I kinda feel bad about that, because what - culturally - do we have to give back to them? Not much, kemosabe. Not as a large group, anyway. Small groups, small $'s, yes. But in a reciprocal way? We're culturally bankrupt, as a large group.
So the future will be ... interesting. Not sure if it's good or bad. But it won't be boring. Lots more stories. A good thing.

You can tell how hard the future sucks by our inability to fight the wind that endlessly drags us deeper into its abyss. Or maybe that's not the future but Cthulu, I always get them confused.

The business models for future media are PBS and insider newsletters.

PBS gives everything away and then asks for money. Look at This American Life or Talking Points Memo to see how well a publication can do once it gets an audience. Ira Glass will never starve again; Josh Marshall now has three employees.

Insider newsletters charge huge subscription fees and in return provide specialized content that a small but rich group of people really want. Bloomberg is following this model and has grown to about 2,000 news staff. I'm unsure but it might already be larger than the NY Times. Its $25,000/yr subscription fee is helpful.

And then there's trash/smut, like American Idol and the fashion mags. I suspect they will continue to retreat into their core competency of dissolving people's brains, ending the old tradition of GQ, Playboy and Vogue fostering new writers. (Black Book continues to play this role.)

Silversmith:

In other words, floopmeister, you missed the point. Corporations work thusly: Least amount of input---->>>> Most amount of big fu*king piles of cash.

This usually follows by doing this: Find ONE successful thing, present it to the easiest, largest possible group of consumers. Repeat with with next largest group of same kind. Repeat ad nauseam. Remember, least amount of input, so do as little as is humanly possible to change the product, from group to group, as that would cost the company more resources.

You make this point. Let's compare it with your earlier point about media production:

...But with the power shift the internet has given the truly talented (and even the complete nutjobs), the idea that the corporatized, effete, small-minded, ultra-rich will be able to drive the masses like cattle with little to no effort and huge payback for long periods of time is rapidly coming to an end. Even if the masses lose, the richies won't win either. The best they can hope for if they insist on trying to frame the universe in their old-fashioned, pre-"mass individual communication" way is a draw - and the worst is where they lose their arrogance, and damn near everything else they've ever had.

See any contradictions?

A final point: have you actually been to or lived in this places that you are discussing, or is it simply a case of "My brother taught ESL there..."? Hollywood definitely makes the money - but I believe you overstate the cultural influence.

I feel you're coming from a particularly US viewpoint on this issue. You have a national market of 250 million odd - and the majority of US cultural products are exported to the Anglo-saxon countries, Europe and Japan. I'm Australian, and I think you'd find things a little different if you lived here for any period of time. We have a population of only 22 million, and these days we have Chinese and Bollywood films on general release now, in suburban cinemaplexes, in the original Hindi or Putonghua with English subtitles.

I'll bet that hasn't happened yet in the US, but out here on the periphery the cultural balance is shifting.

Let's see what happens in the future as the transfer of wealth from the West to the developing world continues.