IP Democracy: The Profound, Irreversible Shift in Media Power

Time magazine’s Person of the Year is “you.” When I first read this news this morning I internally groaned because, well, it’s just too cute and a little too late. But, I got pumped up by reading the newsweekly’s explanation for this decision, as I usually do when thinking about the profound shift that has occurred in the media’s balance of power.

For all of the magazine’s stylized journalism, which can make even the most innocuous development sound compelling, it has, this time, properly noted a fundamental change in society that alters forever every social institution and indeed every person’s life. For all the endless blogging and analysis that goes on about social networking, user-generated videos, Web 2.0 gizmos and the crush of new ways we communicate and interact with each other, the bottom-line is this: this revolution in communications has shifted the power to the people like no other technological or political revolution before it.

As Time’s Lev Grossman explains:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Every dominant media power — from newspapers to TV networks to cable companies to even old-time (read ten-plus years old) Internet companies — can no longer sit back and cruise with what used to be called “licenses to print money.” The new Internet, which is premised on nothing short of the imaginations of millions of people, keeps overturning the standard business models and continually outpaces media and intellectual property laws.

As Grossman points out, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary, but it’s also a mistake to underestimate what has happened in the past two to three years. The Internet, as conceived by Tim Berners-Lee fifteen short years ago (with some important antecedents that extend back far farther, of course), went through its first phase of mass acceptance from, say, around 1994 to 2003.

Now we’re in the next phase of mass usage. And that mass usage encompasses everything, from text to video to alternative realities to convenient ways of sharing all of these forms of expression. As Grossman also points out, its a mass social experiment. But I disagree with his contention that, as is true of any experiment, this one is bound to fail.

It’s already succeeded by making what had been unthinkable even five years ago very ordinary. What’s going to be fascinating is what comes next…and that’s bounded by only the limits of millions of individual imaginations.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on December 17, 2006 9:39 AM to IP Democracy