MEDIA TODAY

Media Today?

?#2. Are we using media or is media using us??

?Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the participants in a social system. The origins of the diffusion of innovations theory are varied and span multiple disciplines.

?Diffusion of innovations theory explains how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread. The theory was popularized by Everett Rogers in his book ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ published in 1962. He categorised adopters as - innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

Our social system is the combination of external influences - mass media, surfactants, organizational or governmental mandates and internal influences, strong and weak social relationships, distance from opinion leaders etc. There are many roles in a social system, and their combinations represents the total influences on a potential adopter.

?Let’s look at some very revealing statistics of scale of adoption of new knowledge/technology-Media from a survey conducted in US, published way back in 1962 by Fritz Machlup - "The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States". He claimed that the "knowledge industry represented 29% of the US Gross National Product", which he observed/concluded as evidence that the ‘Information Age’ had begun.

?He defined knowledge as a commodity and attempted to measure the magnitude of the production and distribution of this commodity within the context of modern economy and democratic society. Machlup divided information use into three classes: instrumental, intellectual, and pastime knowledge. He identified five types of knowledge: practical knowledge, intellectual knowledge, pastime knowledge, religious/spiritual knowledge or unwanted knowledge/accidentally acquired knowledge.

?More recent estimates have reached the following results:

?? world's technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks grew at a sustained compound annual growth rate of 7% between 1986 and 2007.

? The world's technological capacity to store information grew at a sustained compound annual growth rate of 25% between 1986 and 2007;

? The world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way telecommunication networks grew at a sustained compound annual growth rate of 30% during the same two decades;

? The world's technological capacity to compute information with the help of humanly guided general-purpose computers grew at a sustained compound annual growth rate of 61% during the same period.

?This led to significant increase in the process of commodification of knowledge as Capital.?(KBC)

The knowledge economy is the marketplace for the production and sale of scientific and engineering discoveries. This knowledge can be commodified in the form of patents or other intellectual property protections. The producers of such information, such as scientific experts and research labs, are also considered part of the knowledge economy.

?Looking back, we know wealth creation largely stems from control.??During the Agrarian Age land owners mostly czars and kings were wealthy because they controlled food for the masses, giving them power and earning.

Wealth control during the Industrial Age was held by companies like Ford, General Electric and General Dynamics who were modernizing the process of building products in mass and required large capital investments in machinery, innovation and materials. Industrialists like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie and Cyrus McCormick became extremely wealthy during this time, more so than the land owners before them. This industrialism also led to the loss of value in the family farm (land owner), often requiring subsidies and in many cases the liquidation of the farms to larger corporations, where they turned the land into either home developments or gigantic food production facilities.

And now, wealth and control in the Information Age, where we currently reside and have been for the last 15 years or so since the dawn of the Internet. We are seeing the impact of control of information and how it is creating super valuable companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, that each control massive amounts of data on consumers create products that leverage that information and deliver services that are therefore irresistible. This control and wealth puts each of them in an extremely powerful position. These companies have made people, like Gates, Ellison, Jobs, and many extremely wealthy. Each of their companies have market caps larger than the combined companies that led in the Industrial Age.

?How does it feel to be used and controlled by something which you feel, you are controlling?

#médias #MediandCulture #MediaToday #SocialMedia #informationtechnology #knowledgebasedCapital

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