I’ve been saying it to friends and colleagues for quite some time, but it’s always nice when a story comes out to reiterate my view. This article was just released around Twitter and how it is impacting the reporting of news. The first mainstream news to pick up the earthquake that was twittered about was an entire HOUR behind. That may not be long by today’s standards, but in a world of instant gratification and instant information, an entire HOUR is a lifetime.
Imagine how different the news would be today, or five years from now, surrounding the events of 9/11. We’d have tweets and blogs and photos and video from all of the planes, from inside the twin towers and from streets, apartments and other vantage points. Everyone would be expressing their fear, outrage and opinions in real time, accompanied by video and photos. Maybe the second, third or fourth plane would have been spared or at the least followed the same fate as the grounded plane in Pennsylvania, if the information access had been more readily available.
Better and better filters will be producing news for our eyes, and better and better delivery systems will be transmitting that data to the people who need it most; be it an evacuation or a plane hijacking.
News is one of the many many middlemen that the current generation will be the last to regard as important. The next generation will see the death of the middleman. With complete information and the abandonment of reliance on information providers, many common positions will go the way of the dodo.
News as we know it, real estate agents, financial advisors/planners, medical diagnosticians, tv cable providers, internet providers and anyone else who makes their living off being a conduit for information will soon be dinosaurs in a world of instant access, free service and community driven behavior. Privacy abandonment, personalization and free service will predominate in the years after 2010, when the next generation will refuse to wait for information and reject information that isn’t completely pertinent to their desires.
“real estate agents, financial advisors/planners, medical diagnosticians, tv cable providers, internet providers and anyone else who makes their living off being a conduit for information”
I think that you are largely correct. My only quibble is that some people (I’m thinking of financial advisers and attorneys in particular) are more than just a conduit for information—they are also a repository of complicated knowledge. It’s one thing to have the information available, but another to know what to do with it.
Repositories of complicated information and knowledge will be transfered to the web and accessible through filters and search.
There will of course be legal experts, and financial experts, but I think they will make their money being sources of information on the internet — we will need attorneys to argue cases and write briefs, but that’s not middleman work and so is outside the scope of what I’m talking about.
Check out SueEasy.com and AllRise.com — two sites that are making legal work easier for the masses by combining knowledge bases.
[...] my previous article where I used the example of 9/11 and said that “Better and better filters will be producing [...]
[...] been pending for several years and has now concluded, putting another nail in the coffin for the real estate broker middleman. But what does this mean for [...]
[...] 11, 2008 by Dan Graham The statesman just put out an article announcing the death of another middleman in the northwest Austin area in Williamson County; the county supply auctioneer. The county [...]
[...] I wrote about the dying newspaper industry a little over a month ago, but it’s always good to hear other people’s views. Here are a few tidbits from the linked article that hammer the point home: [...]