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No longer are we a society divided by content generators and content consumers; the true meaning of convergence might have little to do with digital technology after all, and everything to do with individual empowerment to both generate and consume enormous amounts of information simultaneously.  We are each a balance of content consumers and content generators; consumerators.

Yin and Yang?

The capacity of the digital space is larger than all available information; but not for long. This year, 1.2 Zettabytes of digital information will be created (according to the recent Digital Universe study from IDC). By the year 2020 stored data is expected to increase 40-fold. This growth expectation consists mostly of  user-generated content like YouTube videos, mobile photos, Twitter feeds, and Facebook postings.

This fast-growing economy of information is vast, whereby we ’share’, ‘recommend’, ‘like’, and ‘friend’ our way to market (or to death).

Feeling it is impossible to go it alone, social media relieves the pressure for personal connectivity whereby information can be generated and consumed by all participants; all at once, in real-time, and at any time.

The requirement to monitor and react can be overwhelming and even addictive for some.

But remember, social media is a playground of people.

Brands are best represented by people. Who are your people?

Twisting the famous quote of Oliver Perry, Walt Kelly wrote in his comic strip in 1970, “We have seen the enemy and they are us!”

Just as true a century ago, everyone can now participate in the flow of information.  As we enjoy access to a multitude of channels, the ratio of content creators to available channels has significantly broadened.  There’s simply not enough content to fill all available channels.

Yet interestingly, over 20% of professional journalist found themselves unemployed last year. And what of reliable sources? A Harris poll conducted this past January reported 3 out of 4 adults as unwilling to pay anything to read news online.

For many years now traditional media has suffered from a serious case of over-supply.  If you visit the scene of any national news event you would agree the number of cameras and journalists are unreasonable and demonstrate a lack of efficiency.  And now, even journalists are difficult to identify due to the enormous number of lookie-lou’s leveraging smart devices to push information online as news events occur.  Enter social media.

Just a century ago news traveled by word of mouth; village to village and farm to farm.  Everyone was a valued voice for accessing information.  People were willing to listen to anyone with news.  Sound familiar?

And as expected, reliable sources for information were very hard to come by, and thus traditional newspapers exploded at the dawn of the 19th century as the demand for accurate information grew and the public was increasingly willing to pay for it.   Yet ultimately, the United States would have fewer newspapers by the birth of the Internet than in 1940 (267 fewer to be exact). This decline was mostly due to the emergence of alternative sources of information; namely broadcast television and radio.

Aggregating content and information will certainly take on new forms for the purpose of validating information.  The public will be willing to pay for aggregated and validated content.

(A great example of this is AOL’s new push to reinvent itself as a content provider.)

I love my iPad, but I find myself easily distracted with access to everything imaginable.  Is there an app for that?

In the future, the demand for the printed page just might be in its inability to provide distraction.  Could print actually be the ultimate “airplane mode” for life?

In the 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, Neil Postman argues the medium is the metaphor.  He describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and prioritization of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a different kind of knowledge.

We must recognize the distinction of mediums lest sometime in the future, somewhere on the planet, someone will say “digital is dead”.

We live in a world where below-average quality is considered acceptable quality.

In exchange for (mostly free) access to content, people now accept lower quality, and in many cases outright mistakes.  After all, you are reading a blog.  :-)  And what about Wikipedia? Facebook?  Who checks spelling anymore on Twitter (or sources for that matter)?  As long as we are “in-the-know” we can forgive a few errors here and there.

So what is the requirment for quality anymore, and will anyone be willing to pay for it if we continue lowering the threshold of acceptable - for the sake of accessibility?

What if your doctor only gets the diagnosis close?  Would that be acceptable?  Maybe so, if you have no access to health care anyway.

What is it that sets our precedents for quality?  Money? Technology? Resources?  Do we loose our way with much?  Too much money?  Too much access?  Too much informaton?

We make better choices when we practice and live restraint.

 (…yes the spelling errors are intentional)