by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
With the return of yet another version of Gawker, I find myself wondering why media technology is so boring and uninnovative. At the moment, you have audio platforms like Spaces taking off (a little bit) and that’s about it. We’re no where near VR or AR taking off at the moment.
Blogs are dead in the water. Websites are dead in the water. Twitter is mature. Facebook is mature. And no sign of anything out there about to “disrupt” the way we consume media about to pop out any time soon.
Why this is the case could be a whole different blog post, but that’s not the point of this post.
If I had a spare $1 billion lying around, I would create a video platform that was loosely based on the old Usenet newsgroups service of 25 years ago. But it would have a paid editorial and post-production staff. So you would have professional video podcasting with a robust ability to comment and the ability to pump out spicy hot take clips from an hour-long video podcast.
The one company that’s in the best position to adopt these ideas is, of course, Tik-Tok. It would allow them to transition from a GenZ meme generator to something that could compete directly with Twitter (and to a certain extent, the podcasting aspect of Spotify.)
And, yet, lulz.
I think something pretty dramatic — like me winning the lottery — is the only way any of this will ever happen. The Internet space is not only mature, it’s dominated by a few very powerful companies who have a vested interest in keeping things exactly the way they are. Long gone are the “blue sky” days of the Web when you could think up a cool idea and change the world.
The investment dynamics, alone, probably prevent anyone from risking any size amount of money on doing something cool.
We’re stuck with the conditions of a mature Internet media market for the foreseeable future. Whenever VR and AR take off, then we’ll see a new, clean break from the past and cool stuff — mostly controlled by the usual suspects, natch — will happen.
