So far innovation has been about publishing, storing, and browsing "everything". The assumption has been that once people have access to information, culture and commerce would flourish. But that's not really happening, is it? The bulk of traffic and links by independent bloggers are to just a few mainstream, traditional media brands. And "What They Think They Know" isn't really generating an innovative way to generate advertising.
Culture and commerce are not flourishing because in a marketplace of abundant information, the first level of value creation is by how it is organized. People naturally "organize" contextually, as Norbert Mayer-Wittman explains:
"people will increasingly network around shared interests + ideas — e.g. whereas people looking for a commercial news source may simply go to news.com, people searching for commercial music will gravitate towards music.com (and so on). I think it would be wrong to call this dispersion — in contrast, I would argue that this would be a higher degree of order than if everyone were thrown together into one big mixed bag. I also think that a big part of the current malaise is that many people don’t know which direction is the best way to move ahead."
There are pros and cons to this natural tendancy to categorize, but that's the way people think.
To disrupt the cons, the next level of value creation for media is to educate, so people categorize intelligently and not ignorantly. For example, a compelling way to educate is through stories which reflect real ambiguities people face in their daily lives. For example, the way Norman Lear exposed the ridiculousness of bigotry even to bigots, with the popular television show "All in the Family".
The future level of value creation will capitalize on the real time interactivity of today's technology to disrupt the current unintended consequence of publishing, storing, and browsing technologies to suck value from people: At the Privacy, Identity, Innovation meeting this week, Jon Pincus (@jdp23) tweeted: great Q from audience: to what extent are we no longer free to be ourselves (emphasis added) when everything is public? #pii2010
Importantly, the "Free to be Ourselves" isn't about being alone. As Richie Havens says in this song, it is about being "at home".
Once one finds a place to call "home", a place where you find receptivity, then its about a structure that protects the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as Thomas Jefferson describes in the The Declaration of Independence
