Food-for-thought du jour:
I think that mainstream media, thanks to the internet, will undergo the same fate as the world's established religions....
Think about it, Steven: Christianism, Judaism, Islam, along with Oriental spiritualities (Shintoism, Buddhism and Hinduism) have successfully carved up the souls and minds of humankind until the mid-XXth century. Indeed, up to that time, a majority of worshippers blindly believed the tenets and the revealed truths offered by the aforenamed "mainstream religions".
Then, around the 1950s, different breeds of sects started proliferating --Scientology, Moon's Christ Church, etc. More and more people were no longer intellectually and/or spiritually satisfied with the creeds of millenia-old religions and chose some New Age fantasy instead....
Well, I believe the same phenomenon is unfolding in the news/media industry: the CNN/TimeWarner Church, the NYT Church, and the CBS Church are gonna have a harder time rallying their respective flocks to their "gospel news" and more and more people will just switch their persuasions to the e-challengers.... Thenceforth, to believe that, say, O. bin Laden is the real perpetrator of the US embassy carnage in Africa in 1998 will be the same as to believe that Lord Vishnu is the great preserving god --it only makes sense as far as you're Hinduist.... |
