Is The Media Universe Headed to A Cold Death?

And that pretty much explains it all…

There is a reaons I dropped out of Advanced Physics.

Like most people in the media business, anything vaguely mathematical makes MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over).

The formual above is The Second Law of Thermodynamics, better known as The Law of Entropy.

For those of us laymen, the Law of Entropy pretty much says that things tend to fall apart.  That is, that heat dissapates over time.

That over time the energy of the Universe is going to dissipate until there is nothing but a dead cold.. well nothingness.

Stuff like that.

In fact, as it turns out (as it generally does with everything) this is the ‘simple’ explanation, but for our purposes, I am going to leave it there.

I am beginning to wonder if there isn’t some kind of Law of Entropy when it comes to the media.  That is, some kind of rule that things go from the
complex to the simple (ie, just a few molecules drifting around), of their own accord.

What do I mean by that?

In the ancient past of the world of media, content was expensive to produce, expensive to distribute and there was deeply limited ‘shelf space’.
There were only so many pages in the daily newspaper.  There were only so many TV networks (pushing pictures plus color plus sound throug the
air is not easy), there were only so many hours of programming a day – as there were only so many hours in a day.

We lived, in other words, in a world of very defined constraints.

Yet even in that very limited world, we tended to expand until our fingertips touched the walls, so to speak.  The general feeling was there there was
‘never enough time’.

This turns out to be not the case.

In fact, it is the very opposite.

Now, for the first time in human history, we find ourselves in a world that is, for all practicaly purposes, infinite.

There is no limit to the amount of web sites or pages you can post.
There is no limit to the length of video or the number of videos you can stream
There is no limit to the length of an email that you can send.

It used to cost a lot to put a physical newspaper on everyone’s doorstep.
Now it costs as much to deliver one word as it does to deliver 10,000 words or 100,000 words or pictures and sound to 2 billion people worldwide in real time.
Which is nothing.

It’s a remarkable achievement – a remarkable freedom.

Nothing like this has ever happened in human history before.

Now it has.

So what are we going to do with all of this remarkable freedom and opportunity.

You would think that content would expand to fit the space (infinte) and cost (zero).

But that is not what happened.

What happened, in fact, was the opposite.

Given the opportunity to expand our world, we chose instead to contract it.

We moved, rather quickly, to VINE and TWITTER (among other things).

In a world of unlimited content at no cost, we have, amongst ourselves, all decided that the best way to communicate ideas would be to limit them
6 seconds on VINE.
140 characters to a TWEET.

Funny.
Strange.

GIven unlimited freedom we have instead opted to put ourselves into a creative straight-jacket, and we seem to like it.

Maybe there is a reason that authoritarian regimes are so popular in human history.

Or maybe there is a higher law that says that complex things must, of their own accord, fall apart until they become really simple.

Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013