New Media and Society

      Aside from being the harbinger of doom and albeit sounding like an old man watching a young man's game from the sidelines... I still think that New Media Technologies will ultimately have great power and influence even beyond what we see today and the possibilities for good use are limitless.  Unfortunately, the price of freedom is vigilance, and we are anything but vigilant about our new media's creation and the ways in which it's used by average citizens.
      The major problems facing the development of new media technologies are the same problems that all new communications technologies have faced but now it's instantaneous problems with zero response time and exponentially dangerous influences.  On the other side of the coin, Twitter is now the most effective way for Chinese dissidents to meet at town hall style meetings to protest government oppression, with the latest and most notorious, a couple being put to one year hard labor for making tweets that could be taken as inciting revolution when seen out of context.  They were jokingly saying that it would be a good idea to violently attack Japanese students.  Maybe it would be good to use more than 140 characters when expressing an idea like... "OK, you're going to have to shoot him in the face after you storm the embassy because the guards will see you and be able to identify you later when we..."[ end of tweet ]"...go get ice cream LOL"
      When we look to the future of new media and refuse to apply lessons of the past, we will be forced to confront the same problems we've always had but these problems will exhibit themselves in magnifying cross cultural ways that could be catastrophic, or possibly could lead to deeper commitments from groups who want to change things for the better.  Individuals will increasingly have access to technologies that will allow for example, broadcasting from Tehran in real time, or Tweeting information from a destabilized Eastern European nation, or an Asian superpower to the rest of the world.  Let's not forget however that all of these pieces of information will be unconfirmed sound bytes that ultimately must be held under the same scrutiny that coded messages sent during wartime would be.  If information is power, and the most powerful groups have access and control over all the processing centers for this information, sooner or later that information becomes controlled in ways so as to paint portraits of  individuals based on the use of information that was never intended to be exposed publicly.
      The new technologies that we are being exposed to will be merely the stepping stones to a newer generation of increasingly powerful tools that will usher in a whole new epoch of technological advancement and multicultural societal convergences.  It's going to be incredible.  And when I say "incredible" I mean that it will looking back seem impossible to believe that we were all wasting our time with Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, and not building massive broadcasting satellites to speak with aliens and our friends in the future... LOL.