Navigating the Digital Future

Can anything stop YouTube or MySpace or TiVo or peer-to-peer downloading or the iPod or iTunes or mobile entertainment? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Certainly not traditional media. Radio, television, print, movies, the record business -- they're stymied. Lost in old ideas and the technology they hang onto and misdirected when they embrace a new interactive one. What can put a hurt on the current runaway digital future is the interactive media itself -- all of it. My long time friend and media futurist John Parikhal recently wrote: "The biggest "missed" story was the continuing damage to productivity that is caused by e-mail. If you get and respond to more than 85 e-mails a day, you're losing about 2-3 hours a day in productivity (which is why you're working harder and getting less done). This explains a lot of the collapse in creativity and forward thinking that used to happen in radio (and many other businesses). There's no time or incentive to think". The next generation is on digital overload. The Internet and mobile is virtually endless like outer space. The black hole that our naked eye cannot see right now is that after endless technological advances the consumer may not be able to handle it all -- to process it all -- and then choices will have to be made. This is coming so keep it in mind as you navigate the digital future.