We live in an interesting time. The Internet and social networking have become powerful platforms for communication, political empowerment, entertainment, and education. We have witnessed junk mail morph into spam; direct “mail” campaigns are now conducted by e-mail, and referred to as “astroturf,” a play on grassroots organizing. Twitter “petition” applications let individuals create a petition that gets “signed” and sent by anyone who retweets it. Recently Newsweek was saved by Tina Brown‘s online media company, the “Daily Beast.” With Walmart offering free shipping, brick and mortar retailers see the end of business as they knew it.
Digital technology changes things, and it accelerates the change, too. The recession of the 2009 has further accelerated structural change throughout our society, in business, politics, and even in how we are are in our intimate personal relationships. Mass media must vie for public and private attention with niche media, social media, personalized, portable media, and content we all can create and share easily. At JWT (formerly J. Walter Thompson) one of the world’s premier advertising agencies one slogan is “Time is the new currency.” Our attention and time to pay attention, are the scarce resources and commodities of communication and industry today.
Muzak is dead, and industries are being turned upside-down. From Detroit to Hollywood, traditional business models are not working well. Newspapers and broadcast news, books and printing, Hollywood and movies, television and radio, the music business, advertising, telephone, and telecommunications, entertainment businesses from sports to electronic games have had their business models disrupted and transformed as our formerly analog world becomes a digital world. We have niche media, as well as mass media. Businesses that profited when they could capitalize on scarcity and high distribution costs, are floundering. A recent survey by the European Union found that “an awful lot of people have absolutely no interest in paying for content, no matter what — and that the entertainment industry is exaggerating the impact of things like file sharing, since so few people would actually pay for the content in the first place (even if it weren’t available for free.)” And yet Radiohead, OK GO, David Byrne and other musicians offer their work in free and paid versions, and make money.
How we play, how we work, how we live, and the way we relate to each other are all changing, as the “tubes” become the important highways for commerce and industry today. We could argue about whether the changes in our culture, communications, businesses, education, and economic relations are “good” or “bad,” but by the time we settled the arguments, the changes would be set in stone, and hard to modify.
Instead, let’s tread lightly through some heavy ideas, with the intention of creating a structure for sorting out and examining trends, shifts, old and new ways of doing things. Though it seems most of the news about the economy and business is bad, there are trends, theories, and emerging business models that indicate things are changing, yes, but not necessarily disappearing. For those who know how to learn and keep learning, the future is bright. 5th Estate is designed to help you map out a route, avoid detours and dead ends and get where you want to go, as you move through your career.
Getting Here
For 200 years, the Industrial Revolution has been shaping and transforming our work, play, governments, social relations, and the earth itself.
Economic and political changes reflecting the new techologies and the shift in economic power, included the growth of cities, the development of working-class movements, and the emergence of new patterns of authority. The time of the craftsman working with hand tools, morphed into a machine operator, one cog in the machinery of the assembly line.
The revolution became an Industrial Age. The Western nations became global powers that thirsted for natural resources to convert to goods and energy, and looked for an increasingly industrialized workforce. As nations became industrialized, they took colonies, and exploited the raw materials, of the colonies and nations that did not have the infrastructure nor government to protect them. During this 200 years, there was increasing urbanization, world-wide.
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