Individualism – the power of the internet.
Posted on 01. Jan, 2006 by bob in Prior Posts
This is an old posting I wrote for my old personal web site in 2004 or 2005:
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New forces are at work changing our lives and empowering us on a new grand scale. Never before have we seen individuals with so much access, so much power to effect change, to build individuality or to communicate directly with the world. The power has shifted to the individual.
10 years ago, the day Netscape went public in 1996, I was working as an executive at a consumer technology interface company and I still recall our CTO coming to me and saying, “It has all changed… Individuals will now have more power than ever before, enough power to take down governments”. Our CTO was known to be dramatic yet he was right as there is now an massive and accelerated shift of power to individuals.
From a single blogger destroying the decades of credibility of 60 Minutes, to a school teacher who drove millions of viewers to an iPod commercial created for fun. Individuals have more power than ever before. The Internet boom/ bust left in its place a fertile scalable foundation with new, easy to use tools and means of distribution at little or no cost…and it will only get better. The photo above of Manhattan Beach pier at sunrise was an impromptu photo I took with my Treo 600 while walking my dog two Xmas mornings ago. I have one 11 yr old son who started programming in Flash and went to the UCLA campus to C++ Camp last summer, and my older son (14) is busy producing, filming and editing digital film leveraging his iBook and software in middle school. The power has shifted to the individual
There is a massive shift to empowered people expressing their individuality – A trend of “Mass Individualism”. Particularly in the areas of content and community as demonstrated by the tremendous growth of individual empowered entertainment (iPods, PodCasting, Blogs, Tivo, VOD), and the display of individuality within new communities (MySpace, Tribe, Flickr, SecondLife, KickApps). People are empowered like never before.
The power has shifted to the individual – stay tuned…
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