The Modern Journalist

The Future of Everything. A Listserv Discussion.

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My buddy David posted a thread on the listserv titled “The Future of Everything.”

He asked a simple question. Which of these two alternatives is likely to occur:

1. Once all the digital hullabaloo dies down, new media will work an awful lot like old media.
2. Efforts to staple the old media model on new media are hopeless. Newspaper online sites are the ultimate case of putting lipstick on a pig. The future of media is at least as weird as anything that Brand and Rheingold imagined was possible.

The question has causes a bit of stir in the group because it’s the question on everyone’s mind these days. Do we develop for what technologists think is the future or do we continue to push forward with small, incremental growth?

The answer, I suspect, is the second one, although there are signs that innovation may be choked off just enough that one is what happens.

Here’s why.

I was speaking with a financial analyst today, discussing the miserable third quarter results from Sun Microsystems. I’ve never believed that Wall Street valued the technology sector correctly. There’s an irrational growth expected from the burgeoning industry.

The valuations have contributed to: the bubble in 1998-99, the expectation that technology would grow exponentially forever, the burst in 2001-2002, the expectation that technology isn’t stable as a market force and most importantly the avalanche of failure buried so many good technologies I wonder if we’ll ever get them back.

One of the cool technologies I always discuss is Open Cola, a collaborative filtering technology that allowed you to build a folder of interesting material on your desktop and share the links and such with friends. In time, the filtering technology could grab other links you may not have found interesting without the collaboration of the friends-of-friends engine.

I wonder what media would have looked like had technologies like Open Cola — and the scads I know I don’t even know about — had the bubble not burst thanks to the irrational exuberance of Wall Street and the VC market.

(By no means do I blame anything on either group. It was a mess from start to finish, believe me.)

That crash, I think, did more harm to the media than most other industries. Already wary of any new technology (desktop publishing, multimedia CDs), the crash just hardened what media veterans already thought: this shit is for the birds.

Where does that leave us? In a quandary. Media companies can clearly point to the crash in 2000 to justify their decision to tread ever-so-slowly into the technology pool, allowing other companies to zoom past them in terms of relevance and importance. They will never attract the best and brightest technologists — which doesn’t mean they won’t occasionally land a gem — because nothing of interest or import happens. At best, they will be staffed with people who have a passing interest in what they are doing.

Meanwhile, the world of Google et all will continue to stockpile maverick programmers. The start-up culture will continue to produce people who create software tools that empower people with technology, creating a greater separation between the media and the people.

So the answer that I gave — or that I wanted to give — was that both scenarios will likely play out. A mainstream media that is vaguely interesting but with little relevance and an emerging social media that is interesting to pockets but with very little reach.

Whoever fills that gap: WIN!