And Another Thing

Today’s MySpace kids make their own entertainment… and their own decisions.
Martin Wright thinks they’re on to something.

I bought a paper last week. I wouldn’t mention it, only this is something I used to do every day. Now it’s a rarity. And as I stood there fumbling around for 70p, it suddenly struck me: “This is a really strange way to go about things. I give a guy some coins, he gives me a whole sheaf of stuff, only bits of which I actually want, and then the next day I chuck it all away. How weird is that?”

I’m not alone, of course. There are millions like me, all of us not buying papers like we used to. It’s scaring the hell out of anyone trying to make a living from them. And it’s not just newsprint. We’re not watching nearly so much telly, either. Instead, our attention, and increasingly our money, is going on the web.

“Once, ‘they’ had wisdom; you didn’t. Now we have blogs, we have networks, we have citizen journalism, we’re peer to peer.”

It’s been a long time coming. But it seems we’ve finally hit that tipping point which all the nerds were predicting way back in the ’90s.

It’s partly down to a leap in technology: broadband at home, mobiles on the move. Partly down to changing habits: we spend half our days peering at laptops or phones. So it’s only natural that anyone trying to sell us stuff (which is what a lot of the media amounts to) goes there too.

But there’s also a cultural - even generational - shift under way.

Have you noticed how many TV programmes now have those grainy, jumpy video sequences? They look hand-held, amateurish. Like you could have done it yourself with a cheap camcorder. Which is, of course, exactly the point. It’s TV busily roughing itself up so it looks less perfect, more YouTube.

It’s all part of a swing away from the days when broadcasters (or editors, come to that) sat high on the summit of Quality and Expertise, deigning to beam their well-honed thoughts down to the receptive masses. They had Wisdom; you didn’t. Watch and learn.

Now we have blogs, we have networks, we have citizen journalism. We’re peer to peer - digital DIY.

And if you come from a generation where polish and professionalism were gods, this can all seem a bit scary. Standards are slipping, editorial controls chucked out the window; I’m getting old - help!

“Murdoch’s colonised MySpace, but he doesn’t make the programmes on it.”

But look at it another way, and all those digital kids could just be showing the way to a more sustainable world. OK, so half the time they’re watching Jackass or some dodgy webcam, but the other half they’re talking to their mates, they’re posting songs or rants or weird art. They’re doing what our parents were always badgering us to do; ‘making their own entertainment’. As opposed to relying on a media megacorp to do it for them. (And yes, I know Murdoch has colonised MySpace - but unlike on Sky, he’s not making the programmes there.)

And it’s not that great a leap from buying and selling all kinds of crap on eBay, to trading carbon over the net; from bombarding message boards with opinions, to voting in a digital democracy. It starts with making your own entertainment. It goes on to making your own decisions.

Web 2.0, as it’s known, is all about being decentralised, self-sufficient, democratic - just the sort of words we often use to characterise a sustainable future.

You can take the parallels further. The net’s often used as a metaphor for a more distributed energy supply. Rebecca Willis coined the phrase ‘Grid 2.0’ to sum up a new world of decentralised power, one in which “instead of just being consumers, homes become power stations and everyone is involved in saving or generating energy”.

It will make a nice irony if, ten years down the line, the MySpace kids are not only better than their parents at making their own fun, but better at making their own decisions - and even their own energy, too.

8 November 2006