The neighbor to the east is again (cough) "sharing" the classic rock from his radio with us tonight. It's the genre that gets me through most of my workdays, b/c I've listened to it so often that it's tantamount to "white noise." Some of it we own on CD; other stuff never made the leap from cassette. So I'm thinking that one benefit of owning music via download is that you'll probably be spared the experience of finding revenants of your music library in a decades-old box and being mortally embarrassed by your younger self's taste.
But for the most part, data--meaning digital music, video, as well as other kind of information--has become "shallower" than before. Lowell Thomas, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, et. al., no longer need to be present with a posse of camera and sound technicians for something to be newsworthy. Photos and video captured by a cellphone can be around the globe in, quite literally, a matter of seconds. YouTube fads garner audience sizes that any ambitious content provider would sell a child for. Yet the breadth of content distribution has a flip-side, namely the 24/7/365 news and entertainment cycles. Increased competition for our attention spans means that the stories rise and fall in prominence more like a juggler's pins than the bulbs in a Galileo thermometer. In other words, wide distribution + short impact = shallow information.
This is hardly "news" to anyone who's been paying attention for the last decade or so. The impacts on marketing are, IMO, among the most symptomatic. At the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing end of the gene pool, high bandwidth is used to scrape information about you off the web and blast it back in the form of spam or telemarketing. At the more developed end, companies attempt--with varying degrees of smarminess and success--to conscript their customers into "communities."
Yet it's a huge mistake to confuse the distribution of information with the creation of information--or, more to the point, to confuse their costs. For all the "race to the bottom" mentality driven by cellphones and portable media devices and wireless internet hotspots, collecting data, contextualizing it via cross-checking and verification, and formatting it into something digestible, well, that takes human-hours. "Boots on the ground," as they say in the military. I don't want to think of how many sales my day-job firm loses immediately after the would-be client understands that merely tipping their messed up data into our platform is not going to sort it out. I very much doubt that my firm's an anomoly among hosted software. Because the reality is that data points by themselves are useless. It's like that episode of The X-Files where the little boy filled sheet after sheet of paper with random sequences of ones and zeros--random, that is, until Mulder climbed the staircase to view the sheets tiled on the floor below and the ones and zeroes coalesced into a drawing of the boy's vanished sister.
This has at least two ramifications. The first has been covered by others, namely the prediction that information consumers will increasingly rely on others to filter and prioritize it for them. The second, however, is that the next revolution in information technology will be a "race to the bottom" for the collecting of data and/or its near-instantaneous transformation into usable information, even by those who don't know the first thing about relational databases or pivot tables or what-have-you. Personally, I have no interest in being a tastemaker. But I've had to sort out enough screwed-up data (my own and other people's) that the second possibility is far more exciting.
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* Apologies for the delay due to last night's internet connection speeds that ranged from nil to, shall we say, "vintage" at best
