“Going forward, no other sport will ever have a run like this, because the TV-cash part of the connection can’t be recreated. Mass TV built many elements of our culture, but mass TV (except for tonight) is basically over. The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don’t point everyone to one bit of content, don’t trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one.” — Seth Godin explains »
From remarks by Eric Schmidt to audience at Cambridge University:
“We could see virtual kidnappings – ransoming your ID for real money,” Schmidt said. “Rather than keeping captives in the jungle, groups like Farc [in Colombia] may prefer a virtual hostage. That’s how important our online ID is.”
“But the future will be much more disruptive to terrorists than everyone else. I can’t see them operating out of caves in Tora Bora” – as al-Qaida did after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. […] Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad reportedly raised suspicions because it didn’t have any internet connection.”
“Our online identity will become such a powerful element. Laws to protect anonymity – we may even see rise in black market where we can buy pre-made or real identities, with all their shopping and background all completely ‘real’ – verifiable online, that is. […] Both drug smugglers trying to evade police and political activists looking to hide from repressive regimes would find those useful, he said: “you’ll be able to buy an identity with fake friends and a history of purchases.”
Kevin Kelly thinks we’ve reached a point where “rather than be surrounded by ordinariness we’ll float in extraordinariness.”
“The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online – which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.”
“That light of super-ness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations, we want the best, greatest, the most extraordinary presenters alive, as in TED. We don’t want to watch people playing games, we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.”
“We had unwritten policies in place at The 700 Club, for example, that denied access to overweight people. We required people who wrote to us to report a “miracle” to include a photograph, so that we could filter people out based on how they looked. We wanted youngish, intelligent, attractive and articulate people to counter the view that Christians are all stupid Bible-thumpers. We very rarely, if ever, invited guests on the show that were overweight or fit the stereotypes discovered in the Gallup study. When crowd shots were taken in the studio, the camera operators were advised to zoom in on the most attractive people in the audience. None of this was written down, of course; it was just understood.”
Terry Heaton was a producer for the 700 Club in 1981
“Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.
In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.”
— From interview with Clay Shirky
And this nugget: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution”