Looks like Paul Saffo, head of the Institute for the Future, has embraced the term I coined in Darknet: the personal media revolution. >From Sunday’s San Jose Merc:
The new thing is the personal media revolution. The world of the consumer is over. So what’s next is an economy where the line between buying and creating is blurred. We’ve heard the word “prosumer,” which gets at it. I like the word “creator.”
You can’t passively watch the Web. Every time you click you create value. All those clicks aggregate to create the fortunes of Google or other companies.
What’s really cool is that the way companies get big today is by empowering the small. EBay empowers power sellers. And Google has gotten huge by empowering people by search.
The downside — are people really creating value or does it have the feeling of trading tulips in Amsterdam? It could go in a couple of ways. This “creator society” could be something that builds deep and enduring value and civic engagement. Or it could be another example of how great civilizations fail by turning everything into entertainment.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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