We live in an interesting time. The Internet and social networking have become powerful tools for communication, political empowerment, and media organizations. Junk mail morphed 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.
Mass media are being revolutionized by the advent of digital technology. Mass media must vie for our attention with niche media, social media, personalized and portable media. As JWT (formerly J. Walter Thompson) one of the world’s premier advertising agencies says, “Time is the new currency,” which means 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: all of them are being 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.)”
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 all 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.
These are the topics that will provide us with useful mental tools (categories, checklists, ratings) to sort through what’s going on with news, reporters, citizen journalists, and democracy today:
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Getting Here
For 200 years, the Industrial Revolution has been shaping and transforming our work, play, governments, social relations, and the earth itself. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica,
The main features involved in the Industrial Revolution were technological, socioeconomic, and cultural. The technological changes included the following: (1) the use of new basic materials, chiefly iron and steel, (2) the use of new energy sources, including both fuels and motive power, such as coal, the steam engine, electricity, petroleum, and the internal-combustion engine, (3) the invention of new machines (4) a new organization of work known as the factory system, which entailed increased division of labour and specialization of function, (5) important developments in transportation and communication (6) the increasing application of science to industry.
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 used natural resources and 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.