the Flat World's Edge

Last evening I watched a fairly dull game of football (or soccer, if you like baseball). My team got an away draw so I am quite happy. But this got me to thinking about the impact this new media world I am slowly being dragged into introduced to will have on the world’s favourite source of information and entertainment: television. Being a bit of a follower, where technology is concerned, I did not imagine the tele-media we take for granted was facing such a huge paradigm shift.

This was in part motivated by an article on blogs written in March 2005, which was one month prior to YouTube being founded and two months before News Corp bought MySpace. This article predicts that:

“Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like -- you guessed it -- blogs.” http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_18/b3931001_mz001.htm

Now from my point of view I have always though of television as the main method of getting information in-front of people, and thought of people who get most of their entertainment and information off the web as a niche audience of slightly quirky people (no offence intended). However, the natural follow through of this article is that we will all get lots of our entertainment and information from blogs or blog-like phenomena such as “MySpace” and “YouTube”.

The article has clearly been borne out to some extent. But I have to admit a time when the majority get their entertainment/information from blogs seems some way off. There is no doubt that this technology is being embraced in a big way. So what is the future for the BBC and ITV? Indeed do they have a future, perhaps that belongs to independent entertainers and programmers.

Given the statement that “social competence lags behind technological capability” I would imagine this is the beginning of the end for television as we know it. But at the same time it must be the start of truly global entertainment as the same programmes will be available on the web all over the world at the same time. The potential impact of which is massive for governments and programmers alike. I am not sure global un-censored television is a good thing.

So essentially what I initially thought was an interesting development in people writing diaries is actually going to change the distribution of entertainment and news beyond recognition. Best start thinking about how this will render all by current expensive gadgets obsolete!!

On the up side, I may be able to watch all my teams games live for 20p a half as Peter suggested the other week – but then will people still go to the ground?

And, as an aside, who will be winning these in the future?