by Gordon Ashley

Created on: January 31, 2007   Last Updated: April 27, 2007

In the future, there will be no pop culture.

None to define as such, at any rate. Because in the future, everyone will have access to entertainments entirely tailored to their own tastes.

When internet news media began popping up all over, some people said that it would one day replace newspapers. And some people figured that was true, and some people scoffed and said that traditional media would always be around and get over yourself. Then there was some fad where any jackass with an internet connection could hook into some website and publish his words for all to see, and when that happened a bunch of people decided that was it for newspapers and maybe even television. But other people still scoffed and said traditional media would embrace and work hand in hand with these "bloggers" (though less and less often with the quotation marks as time went by).

Me, I still pick up a newspaper every so often. But on my computer there is a little slave-bot which brings me my real news. My RSS aggregator is called FeedReader, it was free and it works for free and it brings me what I've told it I want to see and that's that. See, I still read newspapers - but I haven't purchased a newspaper since high school.

But that's just me, and anyway this isn't news, we're talking about entertainment.

We've already reached the point where we pretty much control what entertains us. People have been trying to program VCRs for years. My dad's still trying to figure out how to get it to tape the last episode of Dallas, but those days are coming to a close. The people have discovered TiVo. The people have discovered "OnDemand" cable. Radio is on the internet, and so is TV now.

Put that together with the concept behind RSS aggregation. How long is it before we all have a little program running in the background that searches the internet for us and finds the entertainment we tell it to find? Type in a few keywords, flag a few stations you like, and so on ... and there you have a list of available programming. Point and click.

This will be death for the traditional "commercial" format of advertising, and you can expect an ungodly increase in pop-ups. But we can block those.

It will also spell the end of definable pop culture, as I said.
What is pop music? Pop music is nothing more than popular music. It's whatever music is popular. Well, how is it popular? That'd be determined by radio play and sales. (Determined by radio play. Think about it a second, I want you to appreciate the double meaning.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>