Re-inventing public information

Rejecting the 'me vs. you' bipolarity of traditional pubcasting (in which television is neatly divided into the vast wasteland and the much smaller promised land), alternative content producers have adopted a rather bio-organic stance for channel development.

Most of new media DNA (which include digital arts, vlogging, blogging, moblogging, college and community radio stations, websites, podcasts, and other forms of alternative media) are forced to subsist in the cracks and fissures of the mainstream media.

In comparison to the biggies like Fox, Viacom, Time Warner and Disney, they are tiny operations, almost insignificant in their reach. Collectively, however, independent media represent a sizable force on the media landscape, and that landscape is rapidly changing.

Nowhere is this change more evident than in the areas of digital audio and video being produced on the fly by normal individuals. Just a decade after the US military loosened the tight grip on the Arpanet - over 600 billion Web pages are now available.

Note: China now has over 100 million of its citizens currently online - number two after the US. Technology has a huge impact on ones life when the air is polluted and you can't drink the water.

Not only that (if that's not remarkable enough) there are an estimated 10,000 Internet radio stations currently in operation, most of them customized sites that reflect personal tastes and serve niche markets.

With the growth of satellite radio (over 7 million subscribers to XM and Sirius, which offer more than 270 channels between them) not to mention the growing number of podcasts and the evolution of wireless technologies that will make online broadcasts much more accessible, the radio universe will soon be far different than the tidy AM/FM world of just a few years ago. Africa and India have already seen this.

Does this mean that the oligopoly of media masters will disappear? Hardly. The 21st century is not the 20th century. Religion, technology and organized crime are the three pillars of the 21st century.

But it does mean that those with particular messages to deliver will find it increasingly possible to do so. Mobs will form on the fly, just as content is created on the fly.

While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information. This growth in reminds us that the Internet is fulfilling its original promise about participation.

What the Internet has done for radio will soon be the same for television, with much the same dynamics and consequences (i.e. an explosion of new video choices, but with comparatively little diminution of audiences for mainstream television, at least in the short term).

We're not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing it. That's the kicker - now it's just for the passion -soon they will do it for a living. Millions of them.

So we will have little movies and little records and little magazines on the Internet because the Internet is made up of so many different interest groups.

All this while the media giants are still pushing Brittany Spears. Cheap sensationalism - the won't even here it coming.