Thursday, December 30

Death to the press?

Macon's got an interesting post on the death of the press. It links to a Flash movie (no flash warning here. This is what Flash is for.) fictionally from the future. Google, TiVo, and Amazon merge to form EPIC, a personally tailored information service that puts media out of business (or thereabouts). My comments:

1. Dystopias are unlikely and serve the purpose of warning.
2. Could news become so individual that it ceased being news?
3. I hope news factories do get cannibalized to some degree.
4. EPIC isn't that different, in philosophy, from what current media tries to do: producing products to sell to a market.
5. Does the press really safeguard truth for the masses? Won't there always be people we can trust to tell us the truth, whether they draw a paycheck from the Times or GoogleAds?

Then, from the comments at Kith and Kin:
1. I agree this is unlikely.
2. I think Macon's likely right that EPIC would get subverted, if it needed to be. As distributed as the world is these days, aren't we free from the possibility of Big Brother? But what if Big Brother becomes our own disconnectedness and lack of authorities at all? Hmm...

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