Copyright: © 2008, Cinemalogue.com. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

In college, I wrote a couple of research papers that separately, examined a future in which the average person would be a content creator in his or her own right. More than ten years later, society appears to be on the edge of a technological convergence that will truly make it a reality. I haven’t written film criticism in a couple of years, and I don’t intend to resume.

Instead, I have a different idea brewing. Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at Macworld 2008 this week got me thinking once again about the future of media. He unveiled the AppleTV, a convergence device that bridges your network and your home theater to make accessing entertainment a more dynamic two-way experience. You choose the content you want to watch/hear when you want it, where you want it—living room, computer, iPod.

As I was checking out some of the newer content on iTunes, I noticed something. There’s an enormous amount of Podcasts now on iTunes, including High Definition (HD). When AppleTV is updated in the next week or so, they’ll include the ability to browse and watch this content directly on your TV. Most importantly: It’s free. Additionally, some of it is actually pretty good!

It’s increasingly apparent that the availability of professionally-produced content has exploded so much, and devices are emerging that give us access to experience all this new content. You know, I thought to myself, we could do entirely away with subscription services, cable companies, record companies.

Granted, there lies the problem of signal-to-noise. We’ve seen with the myriad blogs that have popped up and are all attempting to gain credibility as sources of professional journalism (undermined recently by Gizmodo’s prank that got them banned from CES) that an increase in access to information on the internet has also resulted in an increase in the proportion of bad information relative to good. But then the signal-to-noise ratio of cable subscriptions and the like is about as bad as it gets, anyway.

The fact remains that what companies like Apple are doing, reinforced directly by the way they turned the cellphone market on its head forcing carriers to cede more control to manufacturers of the tangible hardware, is aiding in the decentralization of the information economy in a way never thought before: By harnessing the resources of consumers to produce the content we want to watch. This is the ultimate kind of Peer-to-Peer network. When you begin to see it that way, you begin to understand it’s not piracy the networks and studios are afraid of.

This, not piracy, is the nail in the coffin of RIAA, MPAA, all the establishment. It is their kryptonite. The genius behind what Apple has been strategically deploying since day one of Jobs’ return, from iMac to iPhoto to iMovie to iPod to iPhone and beyond… is that every one of us has an idea to express, and every one of us has billions of people to share it with. And every one of us benefits from the accumulation of knowledge. In all of history, look around you… the greatest cultures of the world to ever exist were not hoarders of knowledge, they were producers, catalysts, sharers of knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan had a vision that revolved around this concept. He called it “the Global Village”. The internet has made the world, indeed, a global village, in which the interchange of ideas has sped up and the rate at which we accumulate knowledge is greater than ever before. It’s the kind of weapon that tyrants and robber barons fear.

One of the reasons I hesitate to use the word blog is because, this introduction aside, I have never used this page as a place for my personal rants, and I approach every article with the goal that it meets some standard of journalistic integrity and not merely gossip. We have enough of those outlets.

Jim Lehrer of The News Hour was in Austin in 2007 discussing the state of journalism, and it really struck a nerve with me. When you see CNN.com reserve for weeks on end a slot in their headlines for the latest update on Britney Spears, you know that civilization has redefined the phrase “rock bottom.”

So I guess where I’m going with this is that I’ve made a conscious decision to commit the resources of this website to evangelizing the idea of technological convergence and the de-commoditization of information. I don’t mean that I intend to be a shill for the industries that produce the technologies, though if Apple executives are reading this, note that I don’t get paid and hey… a little love my way would get no complaints from me. But, seriously, I’m not a luddite or an anti-capitalist and, frankly, Apple’s success is well-deserved. They’ve helped make content creators of us all.

In the coming months this site’s going to transform to include essays and other contributions in various media. I’m still committed to retaining journalistic integrity. All jokes aside, I don’t get paid by anyone to do this. I have a day job and it pays well. Any images you see on the site are picked off press releases by me. I despise PR companies that try to make me push a concept or a product, and I despise advertisements that interrupt the flow of an article.

I want to put the spotlight on you, on the intellectual capital you all possess… because the sum total of it far exceeds the best ideas a roomful of studio executives (read: monkeys with typewriters, no offense to monkeys) could muster at their most creative.

Like the greatest civilizations for millennia before us, our society will not be remembered generations from now for the intellectual capital we hoarded, but for the knowledge and wisdom we shared.

So it begins.