I don’t intend to be a frequent diarist or commenter, I will never use the word "Breaking" in a title, I will not comment on polls, Rush, or Fox and I will militate against providing links – for factual verification, start with Wikipedia, work outbound from there. These are simply my thoughts; do with them as you will. But today, an offhand comment of mine seemed to spark some interest, so here is that comment and the replies synthesized in my second diary.
A diary regarding DailyKos "breaking" the Ralston-Lockheed story before it found its way into what is generally referred to as the "Mainstream Media" or "MSM" provoked that original comment. Apart from "MSM" being a poor acronym grammatically ("mainstream" is one word), it is simply no longer adequate to describe the communication dynamic facing us. I am old enough (I had amazing awareness for a zygote) to remember before cable when TV stations actually signed off, ending their broadcast day, and FM radio was at best a little-used curiosity. There was both a morning and evening newspaper. Movies were made and released at what seems a glacial pace by today’s standards.
In a real sense, today’s so-called MSM hasn’t really come all that far – more channels, longer hours, and newspapers, while still influential, are dying off, plain and simple. Meanwhile, liberals rail against media consolidation. Poppycock. Look around you. It’s a media explosion, and more money is to be made by open-access than corporate control. Yes, I would rather the "Fairness Doctrine" was restored and major media outlets owned by more business interests. In the short term, that would be far more preferable to the shell game we have today. But communications technology and the Internet will not be denied any more than a sabot could halt the machinery for more than a brief period.
That’s why we’re not dealing with the MSM; it’s actually the beginning of the end for what I refer to as the "Traditional Media Outlets" – "TMOs" or the "teemos" if you will, since we all seem to enjoy coined, lilting nicknames. What this site and thousands others represent is the "EMOs" – "Emerging Media Outlets" or, similarly, "eemos." I’ll leave it to others to debate the wisdom, reliability, ethics, shields, and so on because it is a fruitless debate. It would be a mistake to define EMOs; their form is unpredictable, relentlessly chimeric.
Even so, EMOs are here to stay, and for good reason. They are immediate, accessible, and personal. Unlike TV, radio, film and newspapers, they are "open-loop systems." MSM is a "closed-loop system." A TV or radio station is just that – a station as in "stationary: not moving." They are highly self-referential, and limited in their ability to interact with other materials and their users. As a leading EMO that gives life to other EMOs, the Internet is everything that they are not. And it is fast and powerful. User-driven content media is to TV and radio newshowgramming as the NFL is to croquet. We tend to forget that DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo, RawStory and others that truly "break" the transgressions of the political leaders of our current time and make total ignorance less possible every day are simply extending what The Drudge Report did in the previous decade. EMOs are the factor to be reckoned with at all levels of power.
I am watching the young people around me. Communication and interaction barriers are falling away like dying leaves. The heart of the American film industry was Chicago, then Los Angeles. How long until it is everywhere? Is the heart of American publishing still New York? That’s doubtful. It’s reaching the poor also. In sub-Saharan Africa, on an incremental basis, cell phones are empowering individuals in the way that the automobile revolutionized America. They are not just instruments of communication, but also of commerce, information and transactions. They are the essence of a new community.
The old, male, white, moneyed orthodoxy has no idea, my friends, not a clue in Hell what is happening now, much less what is on the way. Populations will be connecting based on commonalities that are hard to even imagine today. The next 30 years will bring a redistribution of information with a corresponding redistribution of wealth that might eclipse the industrial age because it will be truly global. In 100 years, give or take, the concept of the nation-state could be quaint, as obsolete as Monarchies.
The evidence already here. A hundred years ago, the Middle East was an empire. Much more recently, the fax machine, satellite television and videotapes played a vital role in the end of the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern Bloc. Who, especially we children of the Cold War, would have ever thought such a monolith would be gone so quickly? With tens, hundreds of millions being made aware that their society of imposed privation was a sham, they simply stopped listening to it. This was not "War and Peace"; few had to take up arms. Perform an image search on Google. The first result is a photograph of Nikolai Ceaucescu achieving corpsehood. Isn’t this world-changing stuff? Hasn’t it become change feeding upon change?
This is not to say we are heading towards utopia. Energy, climate and water crises are at hand today, not in some distant, jetpack future. Our continuity as a species likely depends on a complete re-conceptualization of resources, production and consumption. And as incautious as my predictions sound, these stressors will not inhibit but provoke change. We have seen how governments can simply cease to exist, stressed to destruction by internal trauma. There is no "Somalia"; there is barely an "Iraq." Death and destruction will be rampant, but it won’t be the apocalypse. An energy "breakthrough" could alleviate much of the misery and, ironically, accelerate the change I describe. Otherwise, we’ll just retrench to a lifestyle based less on consuming luxuries and more on acquiring necessities. The future status of human interaction is likely to be the same under either scenario, given the resilience and coming ubiquity of the EMOs. The only question is how much pain we will endure as a species to get there. The "Old Guard" would be doing itself a favor if it tried harder to lessen that pain than to stand its ground but it suffers from a break-but-don’t-bend mentality (the only explanation for our current President).
Corporate structures will also reach an apex -- they are nearly there in historic terms -- then decline as the hierarchy becomes top-heavy and irrelevant to more direct forms of commerce. International corporations and their globalizing commercial force are feared and hated by many who frequent sites like this one. I neither praise nor condemn these entities. Instead, I suggest you seek out a list of the original Dow Jones Industrial Average companies. In 80 years, these names have become unrecognizable. The eleven most important companies in America for the most part were broken up, dissolved, or acquired, and the two survivors transformed but no longer relevant to the DJIA. Are the United States or Spain any less arbitrary in a transformed world than Wal-Mart or Nissan? There are already pressures to break up Citigroup, not from regulators or consumers, but from the shareholders themselves, like the gathering dark before the storm for the Old Ways Of Doing Things. The microscopic cracks in the dam are already showing -- craigslist, to name one. The rest are like the tiny mammals scurrying about under the last of the huge dinosaurs. Their futures and their moments are polar opposites.
In conclusion, there is no conclusion, only transformation.