— Uneven Distribution.

This post originally appeared in Technology Spectator.

After years of talking about “the internet of things”, it seems that the world of physical computing is finally surfacing as serious business, not just an oddball hobby.

Today’s world belongs to a new brand of geeks and unlike the ones that emerged in the late 90s to build Amazon, Google, MySpace, PayPal and Facebook, this lot is wielding soldering irons.

They build circuit boards and wire up new inventions that flash lights, whirr motors, and sense the world around them. They explore the world of 3D printing and hack their microwaves, and they do far more with their Xbox than just play games.

Sometimes the professional outloook can become a disadvantage, preventing the very people who have most at stake – the professionals themselves – from understanding major changes to the structure of their profession.

It is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence.

I just came across this highlight from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008). In the afterglow of winning Agency and Network of the year for the second year in a row last week, it’s a nice reminder of what we’re here for. Advertising, and particularly  the creative side of things, has become insular, self referential, and voraciously self-judging.

It’s when this happens that the big changes will be missed. One thing that awards do is ensure that we’re so busy looking inwards that we don’t see what’s going on outside our windows.

The erosion of the middle class may well accelerate, as the divide widens between a relatively small group of extraordinarily wealthy people – the digital elite – and a very large set of people who face eroding fortunes. In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards. – Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch (2008)

Given we’re likely hours away from the announcement of Facebook’s IPO, I couldn’t help but post this. Interestingly I’d say that if you suggested to Nicholas Carr back in 2008 that four years later a website would hold a $5billion IPO, even he would have thought that was ridiculous. But here we are, a few hundred Facebook employees are about to enter the digital elite.

The big question though, is whether the investors in this IPO will be the “very large set of people who face eroding fortunes”.

So what has digital culture brought to the conversational dinner table? Quick-fire and efficient online talk – which is more about exchanging information than emotions – threatens to send the quality of conversation back to the MiddleAges.

I realise the crushing irony of grabbing a snippet out of this brilliant piece by Roman Krznaric at The School of Life, so please head over and read the whole thing.

There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism. In that mass market, the opinions of the politically engaged readers didn’t matter much, outnumbered as they were by people checking their horoscopes. This suited advertisers fine; they have always preferred a centrist and distanced political outlook, the better not to alienate potential customers. When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come to matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.

Clay Shirky – Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users

This isn’t the shortest read on the topic, but Clay Shirky dissects the challenges that Newspapers are facing better than anyone. The core problem is that if paywalls are to work (which they must do for classical journalism to survive), newspapers need to acknowledge that their audience has fundamentally shifted (and shrunk).

It’s interesting that Crikey has pretty much nailed this model, and New Matilda is battling hard to make it work. Due to our size, I wouldn’t be surprised if Australia manages to be the first country to emerge with a working model of new journalism.

More and more people are looking to computers to save the world, but the people who run them certainly don’t know how. Nobody’s in charge, not even Google, though everyone in the dot-com world pretends. They’re all too busy with I.P.O.’s and market share, trying to start fads or come up with idiotic names.

via Theodor Holm Nelson – On the Information Superhighway, Destination Unknown – NYTimes.com.