What will media look like in 15 years time?

This blogpost is an experiment. I’ve been writing an opinion editorial about the future of news media, which you can find here  (in Dutch, in the next few days I’ll publish it in English), and it will also be available in our print newspaper De Tijd on Saturday, May 28. I talk about the dramatic changes in connectedness (ubiquitous broadband internet access, wearable devices… ), but also about filters which influence the way we look at the news: human editors (journalists, bloggers… ) but increasingly also algorithmic ones.

I’m convinced that being transparent about the way in which we select information and provide context will become even more crucial for our democracies. That’s why I did not want to just write an article, but to report about the whole research and writing process itself.

In this post you’ll find how I proceeded but also links and videos related to the article. I could not use all the precious stuff people suggested, but by publishing it all here I hope to facilitate further research by others.

This blogpost is in English, because I asked and got suggestions worldwide. The opinion editorial is in Dutch, I’ll translate it in the next few days.

Tuesday, May 24

Our website www.tijd.be exists 15 years now… and I’m working on a blogpost/article answering the question “what will the news media look like in 15 years time”. Any ideas, suggestions, links would be highly appreciated!

I asked the question on Twitter of course, on Facebook  (Dutch) and Facebook (English), on LinkedIn and Quora.

I’ll report here about the answers I’ll get and the ideas I come up with myself.

If you want to participate, please feel free to use any language you’re comfortable with.

Wednesday, May 25

 I got some interesting comments in this distributed discussion. Most of the answers came from Quora (the Silicon Valley based questions&answers forum) and from a network I did not mention yesterday: The Well (based in San Francisco, in internet-time ancient social network where people use real identities and which charges a fee to participate). 

I’m trying to organize my thoughts in this mindmap, it’s a wikimap, feel free to change and add stuff. 

Several people suggested this thought-provocative video about the future of media:

Another video features Eli Pariser discussing  the ‘Filter bubble’ – about the dangers of only finding information which suits you, rather than finding what you ‘should’ know. Pariser is the author of The Filter Bubble, What the Internet Is Hiding from You, published by Viking (an imprint of Penguin Books), 2011.

Thursday, May 26

Getting lots of suggestions now, and my deadline is coming closer. Here a quick overview, using Storify. Not mentioned in this list are helpful suggestions on the Facebook group Newslab – Exploring News3.0. On LinkedIn Answers I got a suggestion to explore the ‘attention span’ issue, and this link to a search of scholarly articles on Generational differences in attention span since 2008. I did not explore this any further in the context of my article (one has to make choices), but I’m glad to mention it here.


Friday, May 27

My text for publication tomorrow is being edited as I write this. In the print newspaper I’ll put a reference to this blogpost and I added an introduction to this post. While there was no discussion on this blog (maybe I did not explain well enough what I was up to), I learned a lot discussing on Twitter, Facebook, The Well, Quora etc. Sometimes it was enough to explain the project in order to get feedback (The Well, Quora, Facebook), sometimes (Twitter) I had to ask specific persons in my network. It was fun experiencing how at one point someone on Facebook mentioned a discussion I had on Twitter – life in a distributed media world is not always easy, but it really is fascinating!

Roland Legrand

 

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0 Responses to What will media look like in 15 years time?

  1. Welcome to the matrix.

  2. Prokofy Neva says:

    This is a great insight, but I wouldn’t dub it “augmented reality”. I would call it “mediated reality”. That has a double media — one is very literal, that it is reality not “as it is” but mediated to you, coming to you in the form of voice, pictures, text. But it also speaks to the immersiveness of that media consumption — you are mediated, like you are medicated.

    I think people like Philip Rosedale thought that the 3-D web would remain a static if flexible sort of thing accessible by you sitting down in a chair and still clicking to access a box.

    What was clear to me in my December 2007 predictions for 2008:

    “3. The new open-ended worlds (i.e. not-a-games) with some controlled user content like Kaneva, Twinity, V-Side will not gain any significant influx of users, from Second Life or otherwise, because people will be too interested in their mobile phones.”

    The phones, especially as they get cheaper, will be how a lot of people take the Internet and fold it into reality and thus make reality the 3-D Internet, not some…other 3-D Internet thingie.

    A lot of people won’t want to sit and peck at little phone screens tho, laptops will get lighter and better with longer batteries.

  3. Anonymous says:

    GPS systems allowing to exactly locate the owner. As Vanjoki said, this means the mobile devices will situate people exactly in time, place and in social relationships, “all mashed up in one context relevant experience.”

  4. The truth is, on the surface the world looks wonderful. On the other hand many are suffering. The average US household owes 44,000 and 1% of the citizens make 96% of the income. Welcome to the world of the Illuminati.

  5. Knee Pain says:

    The real reality is that the world is changing so fast that business models of many companies keep changing every 3-5 years. Those in tune will survive but those that fail to keep up with the momentum will be faced out completely. There were 1.7 Million workers being retrenched from Nov 08 to Jan 09 and by the end of the year, it might add up to 10 Million or more. Is this the end, far from it.

  6. Web Design says:

    What I fear is what will happen when all the resources will be finished. As we all now they are depleting, I fear it will draw the world to a large conflict.

  7. Back Pain says:

    The reality is that most people think that reality is what they see from the TV when the TV is just a tool used by the unseen World Leaders to propagate all their agendas.

  8. In order to appreciate augmented reality, an individual needs to be able to do a mental paradigm shift.

  9. Deep article, thanks. I think this is especially true for business models where something is much more easily done over the Internet rather than needing to get in a car and drive somewhere. For example, I just read a statistic that showed 80% of all apartment home rental searches start on the Internet or in this “augmented reality”.

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