Commerce, Education, Politics — The Times They Are A Changin’
This article is a part of my Best Reads of the Month section on my website www.mikegorlon.com. Each month I pick one or two articles or blog posts that I find on the internet which I thought were really insightful, interesting or moving. Then I share them with you. You can view the previous month’s articles by going to: https://www.mikegorlon.com/best-reads-of-the-month
March 2019: What the Hell is Going On
The world is changing. That is for sure. And it’s changing at the most rapid pace that our species has ever experienced. The article for this Month’s Best Read of the Month goes to one written by David Perell who I am not familiar with but has does some really good writing on his website www.perell.com. Large disruptions and changes in any subject really grab my attention and in this article David Perell does a fabulous job of covering three big subjects that we are all familiar with that have been turned upside down over the past 70 years.
Those subjects are commerce, education and politics. These areas have been turned upside down due to the way information is disseminated today compared to how it was 70 years ago or even 30 years ago. There used to be a huge asymmetry in the way information was disseminated but today that no longer exists.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the sellers — whom were mostly giant companies who got bigger and bigger — had the majority of the information and consumers had very little. That changed with the invention of the internet. Consumers in commerce are much more informed today. Just look at this picture below showing the rapid increase in the amount of information that there is in the world.
It’s amazing! The amount of information generated in 2001 exceeded all of the cumulative information that was generated in all of our existence prior. And then even more remarkable is that the information generated in 2002 doubled what was generated in 2001.
And this has led to more informed consumers who have been able take advantage by making smarter decisions when purchasing goods and services. It has also led to students no longer needing to be so dependent on universities. Once upon a time they would have to go to the university library or meet a knowledgeable person to speak with to gain access to information to learn. Now so much of that learning is done on the internet. And it has had a huge change in the way we all live. Especially for politics as well.
“The Broadcast era was shaped by high barriers to entry, which centralized the entire media industry. At the peak of the Broadcast Era in the 1960s, fewer than 25 companies monopolized the information cables of radio, television, books, magazines, and music.
There were four television networks, five book publishing houses, five record companies, and seven motion picture studios that controlled most of what America consumed. Powerful and authoritative, these media conglomerates shaped the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. They shaped narratives and controlled ideologies. Information flowed in one direction, from producer to consumer…..
Narrative control is no longer monopolized. The arbiters of truth have fragmented. Millions of people, historically constrained by the reach and spread of their ideas, can theoretically reach anybody in the world with an internet connection. The truth has always existed, but until recently, we haven’t had the means to uncover and distribute it.”
“Today’s elite no longer have the cultural shield that once made it harder for outsiders to take a crack at them… Probably the single biggest change in American life has been a dramatic decline in the cost and inconvenience of getting information… An informed populace, however, can also be a cynical populace, and a cynical populace is willing to tolerate or maybe even support cynical leaders. The world might be better off with more of that naive moonshot optimism of the 1960s.” — Tyler Cowen
