I'm at the Corante/Shared Insights 'Community 2.0' conference in Las Vegas, and having an interesting time hanging and meeting the various figures in the Web 2.0 world.
There's an interesting intersection developing between my professional and blogging life developing here.
I've talked for a long time about the political implications of the kinds of 'emergent management' which is represented by the kind of projects these people are engaged in growing. It's also highly relevant to the issues important to the Winds audience, as John Robb points out in his latest post at Global Guerrillas.
Now I'll disagree with some of the more extreme evangelists here in Vegas who believe that everything in business will be dissolved into a soup of community, just as I'll disagree with Robb when he says that the guerilla 'Bazaar of Violence' poses almost insurmountable challenges to traditional states. What I argue will happen is that the Web 2.0 challenge to major businesses - like newspapers - is that newspapers share will decline enough that they can no longer act as a monopoly in setting prices for ads.
Similarly, states will see that their monopoly on legitimacy will be challenged, and states with weak legitimacy will find themselves declining as they can't maintain the level of legitimacy necessary to function.
That's the pivotal question, and it's both an issue I'll be dealing with professionally (in a business environment) and as a citizen and blogger (here).
Yes the circulation of traditional print media will fall over time, though the leftist media (NYT, LAT, Wash Post, etc) are losing circulation much more rapidly than their more conservative brethren (WSJ, NY Post, Wash Times, etc). However, I don't blame the fall strictly on their leftism. Print media as a whole will lose circulation, though some more desirable sources will suffer less while less desirable sources suffer more.
I think the way it will fall out will be with a merging of television, blogs, and podcasting so that television news shows actually create a conversation with viewers to a much greater degree than they do now.
For example, at the beginning of the news show a ticker shows some upcoming storylines for the current show. A flurry of comments come in leading to additional information that is confirmed. The story is edited to reflect the newly discovered news, that was only discovered by the conversational news process.
oh yeah, and print journalism will move even further toward a total abandonment of the 24-hour news cycle of actual hard news to more reflective pieces and a focus on celebrity, comic strips, coupons, and other non-news journalism.
Wolf P > Can you provide a citation to a primary information source to support your claim in the first sentence of post #1?