Postman is a great writer and this is one my favorite books.
What’s changed between 1985 and today is that human attention has become the scarcest (ie. most valuable) resource. Because of this, the Web is under immense market pressure to turn into a perfected form of cable TV as described by Postman. This is what’s driving platform centralization (ie. Facebook, TikTok, etc.) as well as the one-to-many model where a handful of users (influencers) produce while a great majority merely consume.
We’re not there yet, but we’ve swung strongly in that direction in just a decade with change. My hope is that counter-forces like Digital Minimalism as well as the inherent flexibility of the medium of the Web will arrest or even revert this change.
Postman is a great writer and this is one my favorite books.
What’s changed between 1985 and today is that human attention has become the scarcest (ie. most valuable) resource. Because of this, the Web is under immense market pressure to turn into a perfected form of cable TV as described by Postman. This is what’s driving platform centralization (ie. Facebook, TikTok, etc.) as well as the one-to-many model where a handful of users (influencers) produce while a great majority merely consume.
We’re not there yet, but we’ve swung strongly in that direction in just a decade with change. My hope is that counter-forces like Digital Minimalism as well as the inherent flexibility of the medium of the Web will arrest or even revert this change.