Evolving Media Infrastructure Thoughts

I was speaking with a good friend yesterday in the UK who shares my fascination with media and technology, both their evolution and transformative power on each other. He mentioned that recently my blogging had become more stream of consciousness rather than my normal commentary on subjects. I think this is partially a reflection of the craziness at home and work, but I also think it is an indication of a growing sense of ‘something’ I am feeling when I look at all the change around me.

I first started using the Internet around mid 1994 and really more frenetically around the end of 1994 and early 1995. I recall vividly at the time the excitement I felt. Each day new forms of software were coming out. In rapid time things moved from FTP to HTTP. Using a browser became something you took for granted when you sat down at a computer. Being connected became something you took for granted over time.

I personally didn’t know where it would all go, but as someone who was more interested in Justin’s Links to the Underground rather than space pictures at NASA, I knew that ‘something’ was happening, I just wasn’t sure what. I knew though I wanted to immerse myself in it and I wanted to understand it in whatever way I could.

Today feels like that all over again. The largest barriers to media beyond music has been bandwidth. Peer to Peer technologies are creating distributed file swarms that are moving video distribution away from a world where the cost of incremental users destroy any possible business model to a world where distribution costs are becoming more bearable. Enabling technologies like RSS are allowing people to become information programmers delivering news, music, audio and video to their device in a self constructed manner.

People are picking up their technology and are creating art or content or whatever they want. Watching a videoclip today may feel sort of weird, but its just a matter of time where the baseline quality of edge of the network producers are making higher quality content that those at the center of the network. Hell, there is already arguably much better isolated pieces of content and clearly much more creative pieces in general depending on your perspective.

I don’t think that any of us can digest it all when one considers the range of interests and technologies. Rather I think that periodically we should turn on the fire hydrant of change and ideas and then turn it off and reflect on the possible futures. As I sit on the train this morning making a up and back commute to Los Angeles, that’s what I am doing. In addition to reading my RSS feeds, Chatting on IM, Sending Pictures to Flickr, Updating my blog, making a video clip….