A well-known media YouTuber once said, with real insight: "The media of the past was a kind of equipment industry — printing presses, expensive broadcasting gear, vehicles. Before the internet spread, there was no way around the equipment. From an individual's standpoint, there were people you wanted to reach, but no way to actually reach them. The internet can solve that delivery problem."
Reading that, it hit me. Ah, yes — but isn't the situation now exactly reversed?!
The internet media of today, and even the local-based shopping mall I'm now trying to build, are the same way. With excessive platform monopolies and the competition between the stores caged inside them, the openness and connectedness of the early internet have already lost their meaning.
That's why we need offline-to-online.
The mega-paradigm bridging the 20th and 21st centuries is popularization.
Popularization of art. Popularization of entertainment. Popularization of media. Popularization of politics. Popularization of manufacturing…
Popularization runs a brutal fever in its early stages, but in the end you can't keep it dammed up.
The directness of the individual will only grow stronger.
Predicting which way the wind is blowing is hard, but not impossible.
What matters more than that mysterious power, though,
is this: now that you're riding that wind, where are you going to go?
