They manage their daily needs of food, medicine, household goods and clothing through a kind of in-home vending apparatus, while giant wall-mounted televisions chatter on about how awful the world outside has become and show images of a terrifying reality.

Technology allows the isolated populace to be “informed,” and to remotely order and receive everything they need to survive.

Hmmm…. Doesn’t this sound a touch familiar? Substituting online ordering and delivery for the fictional vending apparatus, the rest isn’t far from what we can experience today. The feeling that we may have already created the constructs of such an existence made me wonder. How easy would it be for modern city dwellers to fall into such isolation on a grand scale?

And ours is more of a stay-at-home culture now. An astonishing number of people work from home or neighborhood café instead of a city office. Many no longer have a job to go to. At work, we talk less and text more, messaging people four feet away rather than conversing. At home, families may not eat together, much less watch the same entertainment offering at the same time on the same screen.

So some of the factors are in place. But the possibility of having nothing to consume but the droning broadcasts of officialdom imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four or Fahrenheit 451…?

I'd have to say slim to none. Today, Big Brother would be lucky to get a word in edgewise.

From the open atelier that is Facebook to the must-have iPhone with its nearly 100,000 applications, new venues and technologies have changed the way we think about information. We’ve discovered that information is personal. It might have been created by you or someone you know at little or no cost; plucked with intent from the swirl of available content and brought to your screen of choice for an intimate, individual experience.

Forget controlling the crowd. Traditional media is trying to maintain a place in it.

Yes there is chaos in the streets, but it isn’t the kind of violent mayhem that my long-ago science fiction writer imagined. This is the clamor of creativity, of finding and sharing the small stuff, of compiling our own blog posts, playlists, tweets, program selections, friend news feeds, editorial pages and mainstream news; it is the unstructured babble and hawking by millions; the critical independent thinking of a few.

It’s the audience taking control and throwing the hammer into the screen, the clever and resourceful individual who doesn’t have to destroy Big Brother’s voice but muffles it all the same because there are millions just like her splitting audiences into tiny fragments. The one who can cross-check something that sounds like news with an array of independent sources, watchers, contributors, and curators and decide for herself what’s true.

Maybe we’ve reached a milestone. A moment to put aside our fears about monetization and celebrate the liberating power of independently produced media. I’m as worried about making a living as the next person, but I say bravo to anyone willing to grab a camera or notebook and contribute his own view of what’s happening in the streets. (Extra kudos for those who have found a way to fund it.)

Comments

Add New

3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."