So many bubbles have risen and blown in the recent past. All of them resulted in complete or partial economic destruction. However, I`m eyeing another bubble, which would eventually cause social and cultural catastrophe, if not economic. I call this a Media Bubble. I will briefly describe in this note how this may happen within a few years.
How do bubbles collapse? We can go back to the collapse of IT bubble. The fundamental reason for the collapse of that bubble is the influx of low quality workforce due to remarkably high salary benefits. This was a consequence of unbearably rapid expansion of the sector and hence the shortage of qualified labour. A similar thing happened in the recent housing bubble, which collapsed due to unqualified lending of mortgages. Not surprisingly this again was due a shortage, the shortage of suitable borrowers.
In the media bubble I envision, a similar situation can arise. Currently there is a huge interest in electronic media, vastly due to the presence of the Internet. Wide range of media services are cashing in to this demand. In addition to main traditional media outlets, plethora of other alternatives have risen. The need to report freshly and prior to the others have risen. The means of collection of images and data are now available to all. Outlets like YouTube has automatically become news outlets, apart from their major role as a source of entertainment. To counter this trend, these days all traditional players in news is ready to buy amateur video and images for their news bulletins. On top of this, any Tom, Dick or Harry can set up a news website and virtually post anything that they want as news. The result is even more distortion of facts, plagiarism and falsification for over sensationalizing.
News has now become more of a source of entertainment than delivering facts. Because of this, the media is altering the output to cater the taste of the audience. There is nothing wrong with this, but when unskilled and sinister journalism takes control, this is going to be disastrous. More and more people will enter the realm of media and journalism to have a piece of the pie and eventually contribute to the bust of the bubble. The result will be an audience who will be suspicious of what they hear, listen and read.
Perhaps some of you may recall there was a time where cinema audiences cheered to on screen fights and sang along to the tunes. As a child it was hard for me to realize how the figures on screen are this big, and how most of the stunts were made to look real. Today, a five year old will explain this in details as he is already familiar with computer graphics and has allready finished watching full series of Myth Busters.
The good thing about a media bust is that people with think twice before buying any news as real, and with time, will be able to explain in details how the items have been crafted to suite the audience. |
