Are you paying attention to the cataclysmic change happening at your fingertips? Have you noticed that the bulk of your news and information about the world no longer comes from a TV across the room? It’s coming from a small box in your hand. It mostly resides about 20” from your eyeballs. You think you’re controlling the content flow by setting alerts, favorites and bookmarks. But how can you bookmark information you never see? How can you decide what to consume when you’re not given all the options?
This is what’s happening to our information today. It’s being funneled through Facebook and other sites. They are deciding what you will get to choose from and what you will never see. The potential impact to information flow, and thus power, is staggering. Check out this article from Columbia Journalism Review for more on this important issue.
Jim Anthony – So-Mark Founder
Orig Post www.cjr.org | Re-Post So-Mark Consulting 3/23/2016
SOMETHING REALLY DRAMATIC is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are seeing huge leaps in technical capability—virtual reality, live video, artificially intelligent news bots, instant messaging, and chat apps. We are seeing massive changes in control, and finance, putting the future of our publishing ecosystem into the hands of a few, who now control the destiny of many.
Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world. I think in many ways this heralds enormously exciting opportunities for education, information, and connection, but it brings with it a host of contingent existential risks.