The Future of the Media

The Director of the Future Planet Research Centre- David Hunter Tow, forecasts the end of traditional media as we know it by 2050, with the demise of large media oligarchies, the dominance of ubiquitous personalised web channels, freelance citizen reporting and blogging, automated online news aggregation and analysis, the downgrading of traditional advertising to an entertainment role and the rise of the Global Commons model, combined with the power of the Intelligent Web.

By 2015- most major print media will have been forced to radically adapt towards an online multimedia model. Newspapers are already in turmoil as they switch to a primarily online model with revenues collapsing as traditional advertising revenue streams dry up. Loss of classified and banner advertising is unable to be compensated by online revenues.

New revenue models are already being frantically trialled, with more flagship publications resorting to pay-walls as well as smart phone and tablet PC download apps, using the same model as the music and now book industries. These are having limited success, but as the stream of multimedia news and commentary outlets expands, offering alternate options to the larger publishing oligopolies, it is clear that this strategy will have a limited shelf life. At the same time page layouts, features and editorial are being outsourced, further fragmenting the print media industry.

To boost news gathering and editorial in the face of diminishing returns, both traditional news and specialist commentary sites will simultaneously open up reporting to largely unpaid citizen journalists and freelance bloggers, as is already occurring. This in turn will encourage syndicated commentary. There is also the beginning of a major trend to personalised and hyper-local online reporting by major news publishers, aimed at attracting small community interest groups and advertisers. This trend will also be increasingly reliant on local citizen reporting.

Traditional news media, both local and global, will be rapidly reduced to a stream of headlines with minimal analysis. Special editions and feature articles will continue in reduced quantity, but online short-burst information- text, video and audio streams, will be increasingly popular, distributed via multimedia mobile platforms such as new generation smart phones and tablets, already evident.

By 2020- traditional free-to-air broadcast television channels will have largely disappeared, along with many cable channels, with television advertising similarly caught in the headlight glare of tumultuous change. The switch will be to web channels covering every topic, personalised to individual taste, viewable anywhere, anytime- primarily on mobile media screens in 3D. The personalised channel will be ubiquitous with news and information filtered and customised to cater for every personal whim.

All print media including magazines and books will have followed newspapers to a multimedia model distributed over the web, using almost exclusively new generation multimedia readers for flexible viewing. Terabyte flash memory will be used for offline personal media storage, but will be largely redundant due to the availability of virtually unlimited archival storage utility/cloud sites run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.

Most print and video media will be available via direct ultra-fast wave division multiplex wireless downloads. Bookstores will also convert largely to downloads, already accelerated by Google Edition’s retail alliance with the US Independent Booksellers Association. In turn, traditional booksellers will be forced to compete for download business with coffee houses and other social/cultural hubs, offering additional direct media experiences. These hubs will morph into the dominant local community knowledge and workplace centres of the future (ref Future of Cities). On demand direct 3D retinal projection technology will also begin to compete with download media access.

In addition, the trend towards alternate realities will continue, with media spaces such as virtual worlds combining with social gaming to become the dominant entertainment form. News, entertainment and sport will then become truly interactive, overlapping with gaming and increasingly available within 3D holographic environments for maximum immersive reality effect.

The media will now evolve as differentiated reality streams available from thousands of web hubs, aggregation sites and social networks in three broad forms. First- news headlines and short synopses of current events available online, competing with traditional news feeds and wire services. Second- in-depth reviews and features relating to past events and narratives, merging with traditional book and blog storyline formats. And third- future scenario analyses and forecasts tied to current trends. These scenarios will also feed back into current events creating ongoing news scenario loops.

In addition the number of individual and small group freelance multimedia blogs, twitter-type conversation feeds and wikis, distributed via syndicated web sites, webcasts, social networks, media feeds and aggregation sites, will have grown exponentially, exploring every aspect of societal experience and linked to ubiquitous location-based and augmented reality options. The blurring of professional and citizen journalism via blogging, stream-of-consciousness conversations and automated story generation and will continue to expand.

By 2030- free-to-air networks, except for some public broadcasting, special demographic and dedicated sponsored channels will have disappeared, eliminated by reduced advertising revenue and the ready availability of unlimited web on-demand content.
Public broadcasting will continue to receive strong support from community groups.
Specialised channels covering real-time activities, such as major sporting events, will survive, but increasingly these will be produced by freelance spaecialised groups and directly brokered for distribution to consumer groups on social networks and hubs.

Film and video production will also fragment, dominated by small independent producers and creative groups working on particular projects within virtual teams; marketing their services directly to consumer groups and market intermediaries.

By 2040- all news category coverage including- political, economic, financial, cultural, environmental and technological, will be handled automatically as 24 hr feeds, operating largely independently of human intervention. Analysis will be available as a product of contracted specialists supported by the web- not permanently tied to any particular media organisation.

The web behemoths such as Google and Microsoft will have become the largest media as well as advertising players. However a reverse trend will have begun, with greater acceptance of the Global Commons model- a free sharing marketplace of technology and knowledge, freely accessible for the global benefit. This trend will eventually make tied in-house news-gathering and reporting functions largely redundant.

In addition, traditional advertising models will have become increasingly irrelevant as markets fragment and consumers begin to take control. This will utilise ultra- intelligent media search/knowledge mining agents, allowing consumers to dictate their own in-depth information requirements on a need-to-know basis. Low key informational advertising, embedded within social media and available only on a request basis, will become the last remnant of the original dominant form.

Alternate knowledge and social hubs such as the thousands of Wikipedia look-a likes, controlled by consumer groups, will start to compete with and displace the power of the media and ultra-web enterprises such as Google. These will be forced to cede part of their global knowledge dominance in their own survival self-interest.

The Internet/Web will now be controlled by and open to all people on the planet via the global commons in conjunction with a specially constituted body such as the present ICAAN, finally devolving away from US control.

By 2045 news analysis, as well as its gathering and distribution, will be largely automated and fluid- available independently on demand and on a push/feedback basis; tailored to all net-citizens and ever-changing special interest groups and operating in diverse virtual social realities.

Advertising as we know it will have largely disappeared. Product and service information will be available instead via reliable consumer assessment feedback networks, supported by semantic and intelligent web assessment (ref Future Web) and assisted by a small number of specialised human information researchers; continuously updated, with strictly authenticated information available on demand or pushed to meet personal preferences. The remaining informational advertising forms will have morphed to provide consumer virtual experiences on an entertainment and educational knowledge basis only.

By 2050 the major media organisations will now be extinct, with the last of the media barons and dynasties departed. Instead media generation and dissemination will have shifted to countless creative individuals and small-scale media enterprises operating cooperatively and seamlessly in tandem with the medium of the Global Commons and Intelligent Web.

Future Trend analysis and scenario creation will become the new buzz- increasingly significant to knowledge creation and the largest media growth segment; merging with the gaming and entertainment markets, as humans commit to increasingly virtual and future-based development technologies. At the same time there will be an inevitable loss of direct individual control over media processing, as all aspects of reality event discovery, aggregation, processing, analysis and distribution are automated as a function of the combined fusing of artificial and human intelligence and the rigorous decision capacity of the Web 5.0.

The media will instead become a pervasive medium for recording local and global experience, generating new forms of knowledge and immersive entertainment for human civilisation. This will be facilitated by the automatic collection of events by embedded sensors in every artefact and all environments on the planet- delivered instantly via ultra-fast bandwidth and direct neural/brain connection.
Its role will encompass documenting and projecting the evolutionary progress of all cultural, political, scientific and technological experience of life's existence.

Web 5.0, as a synthesis of human and cyber extended knowledge, sensory experience and intelligence, will merge with and start to take ultimate control of this medium.

The Future of Democracy

Democracy, as with all other processes engineered by human civilisation, is evolving at a rapid rate. A number of indicators are pointing to a major leap forward, encompassing a more public participatory form of democratic model and the harnessing of the expert intelligence of the Web. By the middle of the 21st century, such a global version of the democratic process will be largely in place- Democracy 2.0.

Democracy has a long evolutionary history. The concept of democracy - the notion that men and women have the right to govern themselves, was practised at around 2,500 BP in Athens. The Athenian polity or political body, granted all citizens the right to be heard and to participate in the major decisions affecting their rights and well-being. The City State demanded services and loyalty from the individual in return. There is evidence however that the role of popular assembly actually arose earlier in some Phoenician cities such as Sidon and Babylon in the ancient assemblies of Syria- Mesopotamia, as an organ of local government and justice.

As demonstrated in these early periods, democracy, although imperfect, offered each individual a stake in the nation’s collective decision-making processes. It therefore provided a greater incentive for each individual to cooperate to increase group productivity. Through a more open decision process, improved innovation and consequently additional wealth was generated and distributed more equitably. An increase in overall economic wellbeing in turn generated more possibilities and potential to acquire knowledge, education and employment, coupled with greater individual choice and freedom.

According to the Freedom House Report, an independent survey of political and civil liberties around the globe, the world has made great strides towards democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1900 there were 25 restricted democracies in existence covering an eighth of the world’s population, but none that could be judged as based on universal suffrage. The US and Britain denied voting rights to women and in the case of the US, also to African Americans. But at the end of the 20th century 119 of the world’s 192 nations were declared electoral democracies. In the current century, democracy continues to spread through Africa and Asia and significantly also the Middle East, with over 130 states in various stages of democratic evolution.

Dictatorships or quasi democratic one party states still exist in Africa, Asia and the middle east with regimes such as China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, the Sudan, Belarus and Saudi Arabia, seeking to maintain total control over their populations. However two thirds of sub-Saharan countries have staged elections in the past ten years, with coups becoming less common and internal wars gradually waning. African nations are also starting to police human rights in their own region. African Union peacekeepers are now deployed in Darfur and are working with UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The evolution of democracy can also be seen in terms of improved human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several ensuing legal treaties, define political, cultural and economic rights as well as the rights of women, children, ethnic groups and religions. This declaration is intended to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all peoples everywhere, with no exceptions. It also recognises the principle of the subordination of national sovereignty to the universality of human rights; the dignity and worth of human life beyond the jurisdiction of any State.

The global spread of democracy is now also irreversibly linked to the new cooperative globalisation model. The EU, despite its growing pains, provides a compelling template; complementing national decisions in the supra-national interest at the commercial, financial, legal, health and research sharing level. The global spread of new technology and knowledge also provides the opportunity for developing countries to gain a quantum leap in material wellbeing; an essential prerequisite for a stable democracy.

The current cyber-based advances therefore presage a much more interactive public form of democracy and mark the next phase in its ongoing evolution. Web 2.0’s social networking, blogging, messaging and video services have already significantly changed the way people discuss political issues and exchange ideas beyond national boundaries. In addition a number of popular sites exist as forums to actively harness individual opinions and encourage debate about contentious topics, funnelling them to political processes. These are often coupled to online petitions, allowing the public to deliver requests to Government and receive a committed response.

In addition there are a plethora of specialized smart search engines and analytical tools aimed at locating and interpreting information about divisive and complex topics such as global warming and medical stem cell advances. These are increasingly linked to Argumentation frameworks and Game theory, aimed at supporting the logical basis of arguments, negotiation and other structured forms of group decision-making. New logic and statistical tools can also provide inference and evaluation mechanisms to better assess the evidence for a particular hypothesis.

By 2030 it is likely that such ‘intelligence-based’ algorithms will be capable of automating the analysis and advice provided to politicians, at a similar level of quality and expertise as that offered by the best human advisers.

It might be argued that there is still a need for the role of politicians and leaders in assessing and prioritising such expert advice in the overriding national interest. But a moment’s reflection leads to the opposite conclusion. Politicians have party allegiances and internal obligations that can and do create serious conflicts of interest and skew the best advice. History is replete with such disastrous decisions based on false premises, driven by party political bias and populist fads predicated on flawed knowledge. One needs to look no further in recent times than the patently inadequate evidential basis for the US’s war in Iraq which has cost at least half a million civilian lives and is still unresolved.

However there remains a disjunction between the developed west and those developing countries only now recovering from colonisation, the subsequent domination by dictators and fascist regimes and ongoing natural disasters. There is in fact a time gap of several hundred years between the democratic trajectory of the west and east, which these countries are endeavouring to bridge within a generation; often creating serious short-term challenges and cultural dislocations.

A very powerful enabler for the spread of democracy as mentioned is the Internet/Web- today’s storehouse of the world’s information and expertise. By increasing the flow of essential intelligence it facilitates transparency, reduces corruption, empowers dissidents and ensures governments are more responsive to their citizen’s needs. Ii is already providing the infrastructure for the emergence of a more democratic society; empowering all people to have direct input into critical decision processes affecting their lives, without the distortion of political intermediaries.

By 2040 more democratic outcomes for all populations on the planet will be the norm. Critical and urgent decisions relating to global warming, financial regulation, economic allocation of scarce resources such as food and water, humanitarian rights and refugee migration etc, will to be sifted through community knowledge, resulting in truly representative and equitable global governance. Implementation of the democratic process itself will continue to evolve with new forms of e-voting and governance supervision, which will include the active participation of advocacy groups supported by a consensus of expert knowledge via the Intelligent Web 4.0.

Over time democracy as with all other social processes, will evolve to best suit the needs of its human environment. It will emerge as a networked model- a non-hierarchical, resilient protocol, responsive to rapid social change. Such distributed forms of government will involve local communities, operating with the best expert advice from the ground up; the opposite of political party self-interested power and superficial focus-group decision-making, as implemented by many current political systems. These are frequently unresponsive to legitimate minority group needs and can be easily corrupted by powerful lobby groups, such as those employed by the heavy carbon emitters in the global warming debate.

By 2050 a form of global consciousness will have evolved, where the back channel of opinion and reason will gradually subsume today’s hierarchical and populist consumer/brand filtered political models. New forms of the democratic process at the community and regional level are already growing, pointing towards the emergence of a new form of truly representative public participation and cooperation - Democracy 2.0.

This trend towards a fairer and more peaceful society must continue if the human race is to survive the uncertainty and turmoil ahead..