Friday, December 30, 2005

The Start of Something Big

If you have time and high-speed internet connection, check out bloggingheads.tv. It’s Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus discussing current events on streaming video. (Video weblogging goes by the ghastly neologism, vlogging.) Wright and Kaus strike me as informed moderate liberals. I don’t agree with them a lot, but I can watch them; they’re not foaming Bush haters.

The really interesting thing about this site is that here we have another example of how the Information Revolution is in the process of changing the world. These guys are doing a TV newscast in their homes! They don’t need a huge network, producers, millions of dollars of equipment, advertisers, fancy graphics. They can sit and have an intelligent conversation for a half an hour and explore a topic better than anything you’ll see on cable TV.

Where will this kind of thing be in five years? 10 years? What effect will it have on nightly broadcast news?

The invention of the printing press during the Renaissance changed the world by getting books to people who couldn’t get them when monks were producing them by hand. I think we’re at the start of a comparable change with computers and the internet.

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