My Inner European...

Mass media's last blast is an article crowing about the imminent death of mass media. I think this is overstatement but ultimately, the face of technology/entertainment/media/culture is undoubtedly undergoing a revolution. Many question the reason box office receipts are falling year over year (in aggregate). It's not simply because we think the movies are too liberal/conservative or that we all have iPods or cost or poor moviegoing experience. It's all of those at once. Today's home theaters rival what the average theater in a small town can produce. How many people now have surround sound, big screens and dvd players vs. 5 or 10 years ago? Then they were a rarety reserved for audiophiles and wealthy people. Now they're commonplace and not nearly as expensive as they once were. The author is otherwise correct about the "bottoms up" democratic nature of social networking. In the future, people will be very famous but narrowly so. You'll have celebrities in a particular genre of music that will be known worldwide but only by fans of that genre. The rest of the time they'll be totally anonymous. We will always have big movie stars like Tom Cruise who are known to everyone everywhere but they won't be famous in the sense that they are today. Movie revenues may drop to the point that they cannot command the $20M per film.