by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Blogging is dead, long live blogging.
I was, in a minor way, one of the first “bloggers,” even though that’s not what it was called nor did I have any influence beyond the readership in the Virginia newspaper business. I used to run the Virginia Press Association’s Website and in about 1999, I turned into a blog.
But those days are long, long gone.
Now, of course, it’s all about Twitter.
This is a really bad situation for a number of reasons, but there’s no easy solution. Twitter’s population says more about us as a culture than it does technology and its uses. The window of opportunity that existed at one point to “kill” Twitter is long closed.
I say this because we’re kind of in a holding pattern before the rise of MX (AR and VR) resets everything and we have a new normal. It’s just taking MX longer than I expected to take over everything. But it is coming and as such everything is going to change in a pretty abrupt manner whenever it does.
Blogging in its traditional form gave a lot of people who would otherwise never get a traditional column in a newspaper an opportunity. This leveled the playing field and led to a brief moment in time when a few people actually were able to become break out stars.
The rise of MX is likely to bring with it a new type of media star as well. It’s possible that the YouTube stars and Twitch stars of today will morph into the MX stars of tomorrow. The notion of telepresence in itself is such a huge disrupter that we’re likely not to know what hit us.
One interesting thing is what will be the MX media company of the future that none of us see coming. What will be the Netflix of MX? While Facebook is obviously in a great position to benefit greatly from MX, it’s likely to be an upstart that fills the media space that doesn’t even exist now.
My best bet whatever it is, it’s going to come from the gaming industry and it will be the thing that is the final death knell of traditional passive movie making. I suspect that movies will, in 20 years, be something along the lines of vinyl. While everyone else is running around an MX environment, “playing” the latest Star Wars immersive movie, a core group of people will want to sit back and watch the passive version of the original movies.
This company — whatever it’s called — will likely warp the entire media landscape in a manner we can’t predict. A lot depends on the vision of its founder. I suspect Facebook will corner the market in AR, while this new company will produce an MX environment that is pretty expansive.
The problem is, of course, that we have no idea who will the winner is or when all of this is actually going to happen. A back-of-the-envelope guess is sometime between now and 2025.
I guess the point is, blogging is where it all started and we’re about to enter a new era where the rules change quickly and in unexpected ways.
