Todd Suomela's Library tagged web →  View Popular

The first paragraph in the selection above is something I was talking about the other day in an interview on this topic. The industrial era, integrated newspaper -- with horoscopes, wedding announcements, politics, sports, comics, movies reviews and restaurant profiles -- is going away. It may have made sense, as a convenience, when papers were delivered to your driveway, or read on the subway. But moving online, that model is rapidly changing.

And who thinks that it makes sense? Are all papers equally good at all sorts of journalism? Do I need the NY Times to have a sports section? Or review movies?

We are seeing the vertical supply chain of newspapers being blown apart into horizontal focus areas. That's why the most interesting journalism start-ups are focused on one area, like politics, sports, or social change.

I am a fan of local news, but that is not the sole focus of big city newspapers. They print car reviews, movie reviews, and stories about pirates in Somalia, none of which are local. They are a blur of things, and no one has ever tried to unblur them, really.

I suggest that what emerges from Shirky's media revolution will be something profoundly unlike big city newspapers, today. They may jettison a lot of what is taken for granted, as well as inventing something that will attract people's attention in this 21st century. It may be television blended with the web in some addictive way, like the Twitter mashups we are seeing on network news shows. But it won't come from newspapers fighting rear guard actions like paywalls.

*Mass agriculture in the name of low cost output has led to the largest migration of people from the land to cities in human history. There are over 200,000 slums in the world today, because people move to the city and cannot find meaningful work. There will be 2 billion slum inhabitants in 2030.*

Meanwhile, on the edge, people are discovering all over again, that connection to other people around issues that matter can become the defining source of happiness and purpose, in a way totally different from mass affiliation -- being a citizen of large and unresponsive country, where ‘culture’ has become a product of multinational corporations, churned out from music, movie, publishing, and television factories.

Our old dreams are manufactured. Our new dreams must be bottom-up, like connection on the web, or in wiring within our heads. If we are to make sense of the post-everything future before us, it will have to come from our conversations among ourselves, on a social scale in which we feel that we matter.

We are now moving into a time when we will scale freedom based on the social context involved. Ownership of a patch of land will not mean it can be destroyed for profit, because everything is connected in a fractal watchwork, so destruction always splashes onto those nearby. So groups will have to have a say in what freedoms will be accorded to their members.

However, those freedoms will be scaled based on many, some undemocratic, factors.

Those with the greater potential to cause damage will have to step to the greater degree of obligation associated with that. So the greatest landholders are those whose freedoms will need to be checked most directly by group sanctions to make sure there is a world for any of us in the future. At the present time, however, it is more like the opposite.

The modern western notion of personal property will be tempered by this new understanding: that we are all connected on a tiny spaceship moving in the direction of star Vega near the constellation of Hercules. Since we know that unfettered growth is unsustainable, we will have to rethink freedom at a fundamental level.

Most importantly, at every scale of social belonging a different sort of collective decision making (another universal) will have to be brought to bear to major problems. However, as we move away from mass government and into a Web future, direct participation in decisions of importance to us will be the norm.