My friend Chris Schroeder is CEO of WashingtonPost Newsweek Interactive. He’s been traveling in Japan and Korea to learn more about how the more advanced evolution of their consumer telecommunications and personal computing industries is influencing their media markets. His blog on his trip is very thorough and makes fascinating reading. I recommend you read it in chronological order (follow the archive links at the right on his page for convenience), since his first posts outline what he was trying to learn and his pre-trip homework.
I’m still absorbing it on the third reading. But if there’s a single theme that’s hitting my brain stem, it’s that content is still king. It would be sad if all of this bandwidth and computational power were simply used to deliver the latest editions of Grand Theft Auto to people’s PDA’s.
Maybe there’s hope. The ohmynews example in Korea is particularly heartening, perhaps a business model for free-lance bloggers here in the US. (Fodder perhaps for Jeff Jarvis’s session at Bloggercon on 4/17.)
Another idea: in order for consumers in advanced societies to be able to afford these gizmos and the fat pipes they depend on, they will need to remain relatively more productive in an increasingly global labor market. To do this they will need continuous, lifelong, and more effective re-education. Perhaps the availability of all of this powerful but cheap hardware and bandwidth, combined with the availability of free, open-source software for education like .LRN (shameless plug, details in a subsequent post), will stimulate the development of innovative online solutions to meet this demand.