Nov 06
1
The Age Of The Digerati
Stephen Roach, the Chief Economist for Morgan Stanley, often talks about Global Rebalancing in his essays on macro-economics.
I have been thinking about the global rebalancing that is happening in information.
Last week NBC in the US announced that they were laying off some 750 heads in order to cut costs. According to NPR's One The Media program, NBC have recently increased the football on Sunday nights to bolster ratings. Problem is that this strategy costs big bucks and the issue for them is both falling ratings and falling profits together.
Richard McKinnon posted here about the LA Times and how its web presence appears to be stuck in the past at a time when if you are not Web 2.0 you just aren't going to connect with people.
What we are experiencing at the moment is the big shift. And it is not to digital have's and have not's. It is to informational have's and have not's. The age of the digerati has truly arrived.
It is partly about the ability to embed a piece of video from YouTube or Revver into your web page or blog. It is partly about the ability of a resident of Baghdad to upload a piece of video he took a half an hour ago of an IED blowing up a hummer. It is about the ability of someone else to report and for the information to appear on countless screens as part of an RSS feed.
The emergence of simple, easy to use, and efficient technologies (and many of them are not yet easy or efficient or even simple) is changing the way that information travels.
It means that memes (as Richard Dawkins named them), or idea viruses – really do have the ability to become embedded with ever increasing efficiency in a huge sector of the population.
The interesting thing is that the people who first discover and then subsequently transmit those memes are like a group of neo-evangelists. These new digital information evangelists delight in both the technology and in the information that they transmit and they want their friends and neighbours to find out. OK, so first we have to get past the hoax emails that have been circling the globe for the last 10 years.
We start then to see the emergence of the front line information. Information that governments want to keep under control. That many would have us believe fit into the realm of conspiracy theory. This is the place where social and political realities for this century are being forged.
This is why the global warming debate is now on the front pages and prime ministers are scrambling. Because this is where scientists have the ability to connect people with the truth. Sure, there are still huge budgets set aside by those corporations whose care about the current quarter is greater than their honesty about their policies – and these enable disinformation to flow. But there is a growing tide of rational, commited, networked individuals that are starting to act with a real hive mentality.
It is this that is going to re-shape our world. And hopefully it will not be a day late and a dollar short.
Some of the old guard are starting to realise this. Newspapers are starting to realize the power of video in their websites. Telcos are realizing that there may be greater power in allowing people to leave the walled gardens that they have constructed. Next step is for old media barons to realize that there may be greater profitability in spreading the whole truth and nothing but, instead of treading the line of 'command and control' that they have been doing particularly for the last four or more years since 9/11.
It seems that the concept of “Information Wants To Be Free” may finally be coming to pass.