Victor: well, with the comments from the journal entry below it made me wonder the shifting role of media. I am talking about in particular places like Reuters, Times, NBC, BBC, NPR, MTV and Turner Broadcasting who we have traditionally turned to for the proliferation of information. The power behind the mass media has always been their ability to reach the masses and be heard. People like R. Hearst in the early parts of the 20th century controlled everything that was seen and heard by those in America and the west. A president could speak but if the press didn't want to publish or broadcast it, then they were essentially silenced.

Well now with the popularization of the internet, advances in technology, and growing social conciousness among the literate world, the individual has taken a great step towards obtaining this power. This revolution has not been seen since the 15th century with the invention of J. Gutenberg's moveable type, which sent shock waves through the world. Gutenberg's invention allowed books, phamphlets, and ideas to be accessible to the common man, allowing people to realistically gain access to obtain and produce printed media on a large scale. Blogs, for example, is allowing the individual to be heard and the internet is letting small buisnesses compete on a "flat-globe" with large corporations. Zaibatsu's in Japan such as Mitsubishi and Yamaha, corporations in the US like General Motors and Microsoft, and European manufacturers no longer control the world market and economy as they have in the past. Ok, sure it will be a long time coming before any of these will loose the political and economic collateral which they have gained in the past century.... if ever, but now because the internet presents the "cyber-world" as a 2D environment the only things that will set one page apart from another will be the hit counts.

So then what does this mean for traditional institutions which have proliferated the 2D world? Do they become the new nexus to which this new world will gravitate? The plethora of regulations and standards which have been imposed upon the cyberworld mean as much as moral/social responsibilities meant to the europeans coming to conquer the new world. I know that we have some guide lines from printed and projected media but the cyberworld remains, at least philosophically, contrained only by the limits of our imagination and constraints of technology. We are starting to view the world through increasingly abstract terms, not only are we existing in a physical world but now a increasingly cognitive one. Identities are becoming as emphemeral and fickle as a kalidescope, constantly changing, shifting, and being created again. The perceptions of self, of identity, of humanity itself will have to be reaccessed but the media baron will still rule this world as it always has in our past. I suppose that is one thing which will never change, those that can be heard will still have the power.  ¶ 1:26 PM