A famous Chinese curse says, “May you live in interesting times.” Our times are fascinating, and much of the fascination has to do with the internet.
In its brief 14 years of life, the internet has transformed the lives of nearly one and a half billion people on this planet and will soon change how the rest of the population lives, works and plays.
The internet ranks with the inventions of the telephone and the Gutenberg printing press for its ability to connect individuals with each other and with information. More powerfully than telephones and printing presses, digital technologies and the internet enable the creation and dissemination of information at blinding speeds and negligible prices.
As people change, so do big media institutions. Television, movies, radio, magazines and especially newspapers and music have seen audiences fragment and profits decline, while new media like games, blogs and podcasts have risen. The media elite class is becoming universally democratized.
The scope of this speedy change ranges from media monoliths like News Corp all the way down to the day-to-day, moment-to-moment lives of individual people. Just a few years ago, folks didn’t send email and text messages, didn’t post their movements to sites like Twitter and Facebook, didn’t use GPS to find their way around strange streets, didn’t blog or geo-tag. They also didn’t suffer from strange new maladies like multi-tasking, continuous partial attention and simultaneous media consumption.
In the event’s opening address, Brad Berens surveys how the internet changes everything and gives us a glimpse at what tomorrow will bring.
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