Xark!

The Imagination Gap

As is often the case, things tend to come at me in ironic pairs. This week it was a video of Jeff Jarvis' introduction to the New Business Models for News conference at CUNY, followed a few hours later by a link to a December 2007 TED Talk by Kevin Kelly about the next 5,000 days (give or take 700) of the Web. And as is so typically the case, I found myself angling away from what appears to be the most reasonable and likely future.

For those of you not inclined to watch such videos, here's my short synopsis:

Jarvis: The Knight Foundation funded this exploration of what might happen if a major metropolitan newspaper vacated its monopoly and was replaced by a new media ecosystem (an eventuality I've discussed here and here). The study found evidence for a lively and profitable ecosystem including a healthy local-news blogosphere and a new-style news organization. In the spirit of this new enterprise, they've provided a freely downloadable spreadsheet for anyone who wants to tweak the numbers.

Kelly: Two years ago, when the Web was about 5,000 days old, Kelly wondered what the next 5,000 days would look like in retrospect (one of my favorite ways of exploring futurism, btw). 5,700 days ago, most futurists thought the Web was going to be "like TV, only better." He suggests that no one then would have taken seriously the development of the Web-based culture we enjoy today, with free and/or low-cost tools that would have seemed like foolish Utopianism had anyone suggested them in the early 1990s. As for the future, he sees a unifying trend toward a cloud-based "one machine," plus a number of developments that will be familiar to people steeped in quality science fiction.

Even shorter? Jarvis is pointing toward a new media economy that looks an awful lot like a steady-state extension of the old media economy, only better. Kelly is suggesting that we need to get better at imagining things that seem impossible.

The limits of social

Today's post by Marc Danzinger (hat tip to Ad Ingle) isn't exactly wrong in its major assertions, but I feel the need to attack it if only because I find its abundant reasonableness so misleading.

To wit: Danzinger contends that the future of media is conversation, bringing up some very correct points about the value of curation, etc., along the way. In a related post, he makes the right observation about why mainstream mass media isn't equipped survive this transition from the old media economy to the new one. In a word: monopoly.

Danzinger makes some predictions, and since I'm crazy that way too, I'll join him. After the coming collapse of the "paywalls will save us!" suicide pact (which was supposed to take place this summmer -- a conclusion that has been delayed only by the industry's inherent slowness), the next big-media bandwagon will be "new" ideas about networked media. As in: Let's get other people to make content for free, and then we'll sell ads on it.

The problem with such ideas -- and my general critique of Danzinger's post -- is that they simply connect observations about the way people communicate now to observations about how news companies are failing in revenue and relevance and then postulates that adopting one will fix the other. Again, it seems reasonable. A relationship between the two exists, but is it causal, corrective... or merely symptomatic?

How blessed are you?