Technology has empowered us as content creators. If you don’t write for one of the 70 million Wordpress blogs, for example, you almost definitely have a Twitter account or at least a Facebook page. Media’s technical revolution has certainly empowered people by giving them a voice—and it has sometimes spurred real revolutions. Many credit Twitter and Facebook for enabling Arab Spring, political uprisings in recent years that toppled dictatorships in the Middle East. At its best, technology brings power back into the hands of the people. Media driven by new technology cannot and should not be silenced.
Most of us use media to a little less consequence, of course. At its core, media allows us to keep up with our friends, family, and topics that interest us. Any witty thoughts or strong opinions you have are basically wasted if you don’t put them online. The downside to all this content is that it’s getting more difficult to sift through the mountains of data to find reputable, vetted information. And the real danger comes when people feel that they’re doing their part by voicing their opinions online. We have more armchair philosophers and critics than we do activists: the amount of blogs on Tumblr, 125 million and rising, is roughly equal to the number of people who voted in the 2008 presidential election.
Statistics like these are good for people like me. I work for a large media company, the Huffington Post, and I have a vested interest in getting consumers to download the apps I build. I even helped to create HuffPost Highlights, which connects site visitors to content that is especially interesting to them. For those of us at the forefront of the technology revolution, it’s harder than ever to grab people’s attention- but when you succeed, you reach more people than was conceivable even 20 years ago. You don’t have to search for an audience anymore. We’re connected 24/7 via our iPads, smart phones, and Google Glasses, and we’re just begging for quality content to consume via this technology. Part of my job is brainstorming ways to present media and information in ways that feel handpicked without being invasive.
At HuffPost Labs, we spend a lot of time anticipating ways that people will want to consume media in the future. As technology becomes more sophisticated, the ways that media is consumed, shared, and created will grow correspondingly more advanced. In all likelihood, media will continue to become more immersive and present; content more focused and personalized. With these advances, we'll need to pay careful attention to how we interact with media -- we mustn't become more addicted to information and we mustn't filter out dissenting opinions. Boundaries will become more important than ever and tools to deactivate the filter will become just as essential as the filters themselves. Panels like these are useful for brainstorming how to take media into the future!