Do You Fear the Media Revolution?

Patrick Feeny

Product Manager

As part of Widgetbox's new staff series—we'll be bringing you occasional guest posts from members of the Widgetbox team.

What a time to be working in technology!!

We are living through a media revolution on a scale not seen in 400 years. The paper-bound book is set to disappear in a few years time. The encyclopedia already has. Newspapers and magazines are having to reinvent themselves in order to survive.  The music industry has been rocked to its foundations. Gaming has taken on an importance in people’s lives that no one could have imagined.

As a company with a business model based on aggregating, displaying, and disseminating social media content, we at Widgetbox get to see these developments up close.  Most of us are early adopters when it comes to any technology or internet-based social innovation. I, for one, own 4 personal computers and 3 mobile devices and I subscribe to over 50 web services and a handful of social networks. But are we too caught up in the whirlwind of innovation not to ask ourselves the following questions:  Where is this all going? How is it going to end? Is all this technology and change good for our souls? Is it healthy for our kids to be growing up in this new age?

I am personally fascinated by these issues and would love to hear how our readers feel about them. But questions about the social value of technology are often too broad. When you ask “What do you think of all the changes?” you tend to get two types of answers: “it’s exciting” or “it’s terrible”. For some reason one of two emotions (enthusiasm or fear) drown out all other emotions.

So instead of writing about the broad issues I thought I would bring up one specific development. And to make it more interactive I’ve presented it in the form of a poll. So go ahead and tell us what you think. We'll use the results to measure our readers' technology fear index we'll post them on the blog.

—When Patrick isn't deep in thought on the implications of this whole disruptive technology thing, he enjoys developing iPhone apps and spending time with his wife and children in Marin.

Comments

[D. Offer]

A very thought provoking article. That said, I have to say that many of us use both e-books and paper books. I for one would not be without a hard copy of a newspaper, and have a book self filled with educational titles. That said, an e-books are of interest which I have taken out to read on my netbook in a coffee shop from time to time, e-book readers still seem a bit clunky and are you really going to read that £149 kindle by the swimming poll whilst your mates are splashing water around? A cheap hardback is still the way to go in many situations.

[Gautam]

Patrick,

Interesting post - we as professionals working in the technology space, as people who've had the "luxury" of interacting with media in a way that will soon be part of our collective nostalgia *and* as parents, ask ourselves these questions every day. However, I'm sure our parents did the same, as did their parents and so on. Yet the pace of change baffles even those of us who actively to fuel that change.

Cheers,
Gautam