His thought is that it might be pre-emptive media filtering and I asked if that information had generational boundaries and took into account sites like ManiaTV.
If generational, we could be witnessing voluntary simplification on the web. This is something NextStage has been seeing for a bit and there's not enough real evidence for it to be anything more than an interesting anecdote at present.
I agree with Brad that an interesting research venue is heavy versus light use, what Brad writes as "...an increase in the number of websites visited per session/day/week versus a more static number, etc." This is something I think is going to be directly addressed by portals and especially portals capable of letting the visitor place "skyscrapers" where they want in the larger browser "city block", something alluded to in my recent IMedia piece on the death of the webpage.
Also, I think another question moving forward is what impact internet television is going to have on what people watch and how they watch it. I've been having some interesting talks with Drew Massey and Jason Damata of ManiaTV in preparation for an IMedia column. Interesting things are happening and, you betcha, what gets measured and how it gets measured is going to change.
What does this do to quorums? Not much, I think. The joy of quorums and quorum sensing is that they are elements of The Village (hate to harp on that concept and I do think it's a powerful one). They come and go as required and are psychologically mobile, fluid, dynamic. Their size is more dependent on what the quorum needs to get done than the number of people willing to take part. Too large a social construct for a given function and it fractionates. Subgroups form which take on specific subfunctions, each group growing or fractionating until the optimal size for performing its function is reached. Bandura's work pretty much confirms this, I think; quorums (groups) will form and dissolve based more on the group's belief it can achieve some goal it defines for itself.
Quorums will sense they can form or not and that will continue. New media and new technology will only provide different petri-dishes, if you will. Society as a whole will only recognize the quorums have formed once the quorums begin to crawl out of the dish.
Links for this post:
- Brad Berens' Mediavorous Blog
- Coming Soon: The Death of the Web Page
- Dr. Albert Bandura Links:
- How Big Can the Web Get?
- ManiaTV
- Posts on The Village
- Voluntary Simplification Links:
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
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Tracked on: June 2, 2008 11:28 PM | Permalink to Trackback