Media Part 2

This is a little cynical, but forgive me.

As a blogger myself, I am clearly in favor of the new media's getting on with it and the threshing out of most of the waste from the old. In the next decade or so, we are likely to see a new golden era for crack reporting as the citizen journalist and whatever new models waiting to be born stake their claim in the national marketplace.

But my guess is that period will eventually come to an end- and perhaps more quickly than we would expect.

My hunch is that at some level, democracy or not, we Americans appreciate that there is someone out there doing the dirty work that we don't have to see. ("You can't handle the truth!") We'll never really know because we'll never really know, but faith in democracy and transparency can sometime obliterate other aspects of life- subterfuge, espionage, dirty tricks, and under-the-table bargaining- what congress calls "sausage making."

While these "old-school" dealings have largely been progressed through (few Blogojovichian scandals remain, and those that do come off mainly as charming anachronisms), my sense is that they are still a historical constant, only one that changes form and adapts- like the media itself will.

But there is always a lag time for the entrenched interests to catch up with the newest developments. For that critical period where the technology outpaces the "establishment's" ability to figure it out, there can be a series of stunning revelations and progress.

We may remember such a rush in the 90s when New Media first hit the scene. The democratic potential for wealth, success, and excess was realized in almost every kitchen in America. Any dot com had the potential for making everybody rich, and the dinosaur mega-companies of old were all doomed to be replaced by urgonnamakemerich.com.

And they almost were, until they caught on. Now, of all those IPOs from the Clinton years, you can count the remaining successes on one hand- and still have a finger or two left over to click on WalMart.com. So much for that.

There will be another round of this, though- perhaps several. The blog phenomenon will no doubt be part of the next wave of playing-field-leveling, and new technologies such as Kindle and Google Books will have an enormous effect on publishing.

This is all good news, but be sure to get it while the gettin's hot. Stasis and change are in a constant g-rated tango (no penetration), and neither has the lead for too long before the other catches up. For those of us who feel at home on the cutting edge, it is wisdom to know when to dull it up a bit and leave the casino. For the dinosaurs, it is helpful to keep an eye out for comets.

So let's drink a toast to the next wave, soberer though we may be for having lived through dot com 1.0. If we could think ahead a little bit, let's try to shoot for some less goofy names for our giants of 2.0. Although it may be too late for "blog."