The Death of Mass Media.
The Rise of Me-dia (Google News, personalized).
Remember My Yahoo page?
That is about to follow GeoCities now housed in Digital Museum.
At least, it has pointed us in the direction of personalized content.
Since the start, newspapers has served as an expanded version of the telegram (newspaper men were waiting at ship yards for news from England).
Now, you and I just read what we are interested in (and maybe, what our friends recommend), inadvertently, dis-mediating the gatekeepers.
Genie has been out of the bottle.
There are so much happening out there.
We need large print, but Executive Summary.
Each person is an executive of his/her own attention economy.
We each live in our own cave looking out into open- source and open-sky.
Gushing news , Google news , Hulu Plus etc…
No time to drink that beer on Ventura Highway.
Got to be discriminating.
Got to be selective ( besides, since it’s open to comment , we are empowered to leave feedback and exercise our citizenry/consumer rights).
This is what Ralph Nader has touted for years.
No more Networks’ “I am mad as hell, I won’t take it anymore”.
Everyman is a (Larry) King without the suspenders but with the radio mike.
All because of improved uploading speed, algorithm and crowd sourcing.
Stored data in the cloud.
Between Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and Google, we can access libraries of digitized content.
And conveniently, the recommended choices are readily popped up so we won’t have to “hunt and gather”.
I fear the day of discovery is over. No more stumbling upon s/t unexpected and unplanned.
What’s that foreign movie we happened to see because we browsed the shelves of a local video store?
Or the book we borrowed from a college friend?
It’s one thing to be confined in an internet cafe.
It’s quite another to stay at home, yet still desk bound (or screen-bound in the case of I-pad),
thinking that we are connected to the larger world, but actually that “world” has just been reduced into an extension of our selves,
i.e. no views we disagree with are allowed in, no subject too foreign, and no time for public discourse.
It’s an era when we are just on the verge of near complete globalization of trade and travel (Google and ITA), just to end up with narrow casting and narcissism.
Or maybe they are two necessary sides of the same coin. The great divide (between those who stay, and those who go, between Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen – in Butterfly).
The gap to reach shared and mutual understanding is widening due to atomization and availability of content.
No wonder in India, as it gets more connected (broadband and call centers), it gets more divided with sectarian conflicts such as the Maoist movement.
And with I-news, I wouldn’t know anything about it. You see, I set up Google Alert on News from Vietnam. And you from Ireland, S Africa and Australia. Your News.
My entertainment (magazine style). Harry Potter vs Jet Li, the Spy Next Door with Jackie Chan in fiction and a Russian Femme Fatale in life.
East and West, the twain shall never meet, in the age of Internet. Give me my remote control. It’s mine.
Thang Nguyen 555 