What the popularization of a particular category within an industry or society means
Popularization is an important indicator of whether an innovation or revolution has succeeded.
And that innovation or revolution provides humanity with a new paradigm or evolution.
In the past, when revolution and innovation - so-called popularization - were rare, the mere appearance of popularization itself was celebrated as a major paradigm, became an issue, and got conceptualized. The Agricultural Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and Information Revolution are examples.
But starting with the Information Revolution - the spread of Internet-based popularization,
and especially with the shift from location-based networks to phone-based mobile networks,
revolution - in other words, popularization. More concretely, human revolution - has been exploding like a Big Bang.
The sheer frequency and impact of popularization has already crossed a threshold; it no longer registers as a cognitive stimulus.
Popularization blurs the line between experts and non-experts. It's a kind of upward leveling.
Upward leveling pushes experts to break their specialty into finer slices and go deeper (half voluntarily, half forced).
As is often the case, perception-shaking revolutions (again, that popularization) started first in the arts.
Think Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock.
Then photography became popularized through DSLRs, Polaroids, and phone cameras. And photography instantly triggered the popularization of journalism.
At the same time, ICT was undergoing a location-based network revolution (popularization). The result was a literal Big Bang in the already-popularized art, photography, and journalism.
As everyone expected, diffusion and popularization also expanded and branched out into education (so-called Ivy League and SKY university courses becoming accessible to non-students) via the MOOC wave.
Humanity has experienced this before, centuries ago. When the public's education level rises - in other words, knowledge-upward-leveling and perception-expansion - the French Revolution, many religious revolutions, and independence movements can all be cited as examples. The moment when things that seemed obvious no longer do - that revolution emerges from popularization and is stabilized by popularization.
Popularization of religion, class, art (fine art, photography), journalism... I thought once we got this far, it was over. But it wasn't the end, it was the beginning. Popularization (revolution) itself became popularized.
OK, let's list the categories where popularization is already seeping in so naturally it goes unnoticed.
Singers. - It started with survival shows, and now so-called voluntary indie singers enjoy fandoms on YouTube rivaling signed acts, and "semi-celebrities" who aren't singers by trade are everywhere.
Media. Video production. Programming. Distribution. Sales. Production. Finance. Teaching. Many social, economic, and cultural categories... Honestly, these category distinctions themselves no longer fit reality. Recently, even an individual's daily life and personal data is being recognized as exchange value in economics and industry. Even the definition of work - "job" - is being shaken.
The foundation of "human as a member of society" - and the signs (semiotics) that define perception and judgment in human-to-human communication - is itself being threatened.
The reason I'm raising "popularization" isn't really to list what's already happened - it's to organize my thinking about what's next: where will the next innovation, upward leveling, singularity, popularization point?
Popularization started on the producer (supplier) side - the industrial side. In this process, the public has exerted influence over producers (suppliers), pushing producers' attitudes and the price-performance of their products upward.
Then popularization popularized the high-end art market. In the process, it expanded perception around wealth inequality, journalism, and the surrounding environment. Initially the entry barriers were about becoming an artist, then about being an art lover or viewer, and today distribution and sharing of art have been popularized and everyday-ified.
Going forward, popularization will start to disturb more sensitive places. Namely, the popularization of social-organization formation and structural change. For example, political participation and influence over politics. Participation in investigative processes and influence over them. That's the kind of popularization I'm expecting. The backdrop here is gravity (inertia). Popularization expands in the way (B) below.
For example, starting from "every Tom, Dick, and Harry is making art now," the result is that anyone paints, photography - which wasn't even considered art - gets absorbed into art, everyone views photos, "I could take that photo too," and as many people start taking photos and viewing the phenomena captured in them, things people took for granted get treated as issues, expanding all the way to journalism.
Issues become perceived as inconveniences. Humans, driven by instinct, build tools to remove inconveniences, and those tools in turn further develop humanity's five senses plus emotion.
The human sixth sense - more developed now - further develops tools to improve inconveniences (price-performance -> consumption -> distribution popularization), and to reduce the fatigue that arises in that process, the culture (entertainment) they've been consuming develops too (consumption -> production -> distribution popularization).
Humans then start to think about fundamental alternatives. Much like how, in response to customer complaints that an elevator is too slow, instead of upgrading the elevator you install a mirror in front of it - it's a shift in the direction of problem-solving, a change in thinking.
That's how we come to participate in changing the economy and society themselves. One concern in my brain-rambling so far is that, at this point, there's a high probability of what's shown below.
The process of popularization is, in fact, not smooth. Driven by physical inertia it keeps expanding, but the elasticity and resistance of organizations isn't negligible. Diffusion and elasticity can tear past a certain threshold.
Beyond the resistance of internal vested interests and first-movers, you can also run into external inter-nation stakes.
OK, if you recognize this flow, it's now time to think: where am I in this (where will I belong), what can I do there, and how far can I carry it?
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