August 13th Newsletter
Thought for the week: Sometimes the best cure for anxiety, the stress that you can’t solve, is just cleaning up your space. Give away, trash, recycle what you no longer need.
This is going to be a bit different than my usual posts on technology but I’ve been thinking about how different the experience of my daughter is going to be from the experience of myself and my parents up regarding media.
If you reached adulthood prior to the social media era, you grew up in the mass media era. I would define the mass media era as 1950 to 2010, 60 years. In this era, we experienced centralized news, the rise of mass culture through movies, music and TV. It was classic Hollywood all the way to big summer blockbusters. It was the Beatles through the golden age of rap music. It was Walter Cronkite to Wolf Blitzer. If you are of a certain age, you know exactly what I’m referring to.
The era before that was more diffuse, information was slower to travel so it wasn’t really possible to have mass culture.
Now we have easier access to information but an absolute deluge of information. Our algorithms (and soon our AI bot) are enabling us to have personalized experiences of media.
So, there was no mass culture because it was impossible, then there was a 60 year mass culture, now there is a personalized culture.
Those of us who grew up with mass culture are struggling.
We are the middle children of history.
To solve the problems of our age, I think we have to stop trying to go back to the mass media age. It’s over.
You can’t solve the problems of the current age with solutions from an era that has ended.