The Next Media Revolution, Ctd.

A reader dissents:

You wrote: "Even print-on-paper will change - and power will be dispersed."

I'm convinced that you're wrong with respect to the latter part of that statement. In Albert Barabási's book, "Linked," he explains how scale-free networks are an innate organizational feature of economic, social, and even biological structures. Scale free networks are characterized by the concentration of connectivity around a few extremely well connected hubs. Google.com or Facebook.com, for example, operate as such hubs on today's internet. These hubs act as gate keepers.

While the power to print or create media will be "dispersed," the power to be seen and heard will remain concentrated in a few highly connected hubs. The top ten search results on Google, or the daily links on the Drudge Report, these are examples of where the power will be found in the future. Even if the NY Times disappears, some other aggregator or wiki site will take its place as the channel through which we all access information.

Therefore it is not really accurate to say, as you did, that power will be dispersed. It is more accurate to say that power will change hands.

But these hubs are essential to organizing and navigating the mass of information; they don't have a monopoly on the production of such information, as big publishers, moneyed newspaper or magazine proprietors used to. That's the power-shift; and, in my view, it's more profound than most currently have absorbed.