Economics/Geekonomics

Media Wars Part 1: The Analysis

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INTRODUCTION: Reviewing the stories of last week, issues of media, ownership, and more were big.  There were talks about scanilations and author income, of game companies and resold games.  Last week brought to light a simple fact – today there is a lot of unease, turning into outright hostility, between the consumers, creators, and distributors of media.  My goal is to analyze that situation and look at possible solutions because it affects the geekonomy, and because it's hard for me to shut up about my opinions.

In this and the upcoming posts I will be covering a lot of ground, clearly missing things or generalizing.  Forgive such issues – this is a complex issue.

There's an odd undercurrent of hostility in the media marketplace.  You can hear it in conversations, where discussions of casual downloads might include a snide remark about how much DVDs cost.  You see it in the news, where strange lawsuits are brought against people for what appear to be trivial reasons.  You feel it when an author discusses the craziness of the media market place and how they're concerned about being paid – or how angry they are at a publisher or a downloader.  There's something that seems broken out there in the world of the media marketplace – and thus, part of the Geekonomy.

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Geekery, Trends, and Megaregions

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I live in nerd central.  I'm in Silicon Valley.  I can WALK to the headquarters of important companies.  I've found myself in random conversations with famous people in gaming.  I have casual conversations with people about multi-million dollar deals.  Local news here is international news on an economic and cultural scale.

This is one of those areas that I've been talking about a lot lately – the Megaregion.  Those big economic/social/technical/industry clusters that seem to be the future of economic development.

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Frustration Friday: Narrow Perspectives, Broad Problems

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I have a college degree.  People like myself will have a much lesser unemployment rate than people with less education.

I live in Silicon Valley.  I have access to jobs and jobs resources others may not have if they're not in a region like that.

I am in my early 40's.  I'm not old enough that my age is an issue in my career – in some cases, it's an advantage.

I try to stay aware of what it's like for other people, those with different education, those with different locations.  My experience in this economy is not the experience of others – in fact it may be radically different from what they experience.  I count myself fortunate that I have friends around the world in different situations as there's someone there to kick my butt when I think the rest of the world lives like I do.

It's tough and I'm a news junkie – I still follow what's up in Greece.  But I worry that I – and others – may not have the broad perspectives we need to help solve the economic problems the world faces.  Or at the very least our perspectives will be too narrow and we'll inadvertently forget those who suffer who aren't like us.

The Great Recession has hit people hard, but who is hit and how hard they're hit varies radically by education, location, profession, and more.  My experience is probably not your experience, your experience is not your best friend's experience, and so on.  The pain is not distributed evenly.

So in the months and years and decades to come as we all hopefully work to solve the fallout from the Great Recessions, repair our economies, humiliate the incompetent, and lock up the right people, I worry we'll loose perspective.

Will those of us in the regions that are ideal for geeks forget those that aren't – and those with economic problems?

What of those of us with the degrees that let us find jobs – will we forget what others are going through?

Will those of us old enough have the experience to get jobs forget the young?

Will those of us young enough to not worry about our older age forget those who are already aged – and will we be surprised when we're their age?

I worry we won't keep the proper perspectives.  That we'll push for recoveries and policies that affect what we think is everyone but is really just us.  Then we won't notice the half-baked ideas we've pushed and asked for didn't quite do it – because we'll move in our own spheres and circles, until we painfully realize just how connected the world is.

– Steven Savage