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USA Edition | Today Is Thursday, September 9, 2010 |
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| Browsing The Publisher Materials | 53 Items Found | ||
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The Connectivity Generation
For all the reach and immediacy of broadcasting, the scarcity of media resources continued to perpetuate a controlled publishing environment that sharply limited who could participate in the richly profitable one-to-many media. The general public, forever confined to being part of the many and never the one, were rarely permitted to be originators of content. What we know about one another was economically relegated to only the few — the wealthy, educated and responsible.
Across America
The Demise Of One To Many Media
For centuries what humans knew about their country, community or neighbors was determined by personal contact. Then came the printing press and the first fundamental change in how we communicate with one another since the dawn of time. What changed wasn’t so much the transposition of information from stone and papyrus as it was the expansion of communication from person-to-person, the one-on-one model, to a new one-to-many model in which information could be disseminated from one person to large numbers of people.
The Book: Progenitor Of One-To-Many Publishing
Everything we know and believe about life on planet Earth changed that day — like a shot heard around the world absent context, analysis, or any seeming sense of its significance as an agent of change.
Ever since the invention of the printing press nearly six hundred years ago, media has played an important role in our lives. The growth and power of media changed little until the launch of broadcasting less than a century ago. Electronic media broadened the reach of information as well as introducing immediacy for events taking place far away. But whether print or broadcasting, being in the media business required substantial capital investment, talented staff and, in the case of broadcasting, governmental license.
For all the reach and immediacy of broadcasting, the scarcity of media resources continued to perpetuate a controlled publishing environment that sharply limited who could participate in the richly profitable one-to-many media. The general public, forever confined to being part of the many and never the one, were rarely permitted to be originators of content. What we know about one another was economically relegated to only the few — the wealthy, educated and responsible.
Trading Responsible Content For Public Access
The Many-To Many Era -- Many Benefits -- Many Challenges
Without anyone consciously deciding to do so, the limited access to what was to be delivered by media fell to people who has a vested interest in, and sometimes a conscientious intention to use their powerful voice to filter content. Such filtering had both good and bad consequences for it reinforced nationally what had once been limited only to small communities — a sense of shred interest in events, outcomes and issues of the day.
Almost everything everyone knew in the 20th century was filtered toward the public interest in general. Prior to 1990 newspapers and broadcasters largely conformed their news and information content to reinforce the Great American Dream, sense of national identity, political centrism, and public decency.
The generations who grew up in this environment possessed a sense of connectedness with other Americans, a clear view of the dominant culture and the role of the individual in building and extending the American pie from which everyone benefited and depended upon.
Neither the rise of Rock & Roll, nor the hippie generation, nor the sexual revolution substantially changed our national sense of shared nation, shared burden and shared commitment. At least not so long as the media tied us together as a community and constantly reflected values of reliability, accountability, responsibility and some ethereal notion of there being an American way.
End Of Media Scarcity
Today, media scarcity is forever gone. Today’s New Media is plentiful, globally available — and free of nearly every restriction — good, or bad.
Then one sunny afternoon at Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center the integration of Ethernet digital transmission technology with what would later be called packet routing ended forever the one-to-many nature of media. Without so much as a celebration, packet switching, and the end of the one-to-many era in publishing appears destined to be the single biggest event it history. Everything we know and believe about life on planet Earth changed that day — like a shot heard around the world absent context, analysis, or any seeming sense of its significance as an agent of change.
In a flurry of events that included Apple’s decision to market the Apple II and Mike D’Addio and Mark Hahn’s decision to build a packet switched interface to connect Winchester hard-drives to the Apple II, the potential for packet-switching beyond private Ethernet local networks exploded.
By the early 1980′s 600 years of one-to-many dominance by the rich and powerful began to give way to new voices, new ideas and immense riches of information. So did centuries of responsible publishing, capital requirement, infrastructure investment and distance limitations on media.
Today, media scarcity is forever gone. Today’s New Media is plentiful, globally available — and free of nearly every restriction — good, or bad.
It’s changed our culture, enriched mankind’s knowledge, damaged social cohesion and opened a new world with consequences largely unknown.
The Internet