twitter / ustream : Paradigm shift, inflection point, disruptive technologies and the wall of voodoo

Of course the term Cit­i­zen Jour­nal­ist came into focus as blogs and per­sonal home pages took off, twit­ter gave it a new life as wit­ness accounts of major events were done in real­time. So in 2006, you had the rise of the blog­gers, in 2008 you had the tweets updat­ing news and in 2009, stream­ing make it’s mark. It will not take time to see major news, tri­umphs and tragedy brought to you in real time by an ordi­nary Joe with a smart­phone at the wrong or right place at the right time.

NGC

1) The Par­a­digm shift : when new dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy change the under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy plat­form and trans­form it : Ustream

Attach a small cam­era onto your col­lar, put your­self in an inter­est­ing envi­ron­ment and you can share your sit­u­a­tion live to any­one that cares to watch it.  Surely this is a Par­a­digm shift or rev­o­lu­tion­ary sci­ence, exactly what Thomas Kuhn meant in his book in 1962 when he coined the phrase. One of his major obser­va­tion was that sci­ence under­goes a rev­o­lu­tion change period instead of a lin­ear and con­tin­u­ous way. Sound famil­iar? Change the word sci­ence to Inter­net, and you will see that twitter/ustream together sin­gle hand­edly is cre­at­ing a par­a­digm shift within the inter­net from a dull, flat browser based, email and data share platform.

2) Inflec­tion point : the chang­ing of the rules

“In dif­fer­en­tial cal­cu­lus, an inflec­tion point, point of inflec­tion, or inflec­tion is a point on a curve at which the cur­va­ture (sec­ond deriv­a­tive) changes signs. The curve changes from being con­cave upwards (pos­i­tive cur­va­ture) to con­cave down­wards (neg­a­tive cur­va­ture), or vice versa. If one imag­ines dri­ving a vehi­cle along a wind­ing road, inflec­tion is the point at which the steering-wheel is momen­tar­ily “straight” when being turned from left to right or vice versa.” from Wiki.

The The Par­a­digm shift even­tu­ally will cause social and com­mer­cials rules to change. No one can fore­see this, as this change is fluid and may be manip­u­lated to pub­lic opin­ion. Rules may change on how news and pro­gram trans­mits, effect­ing the debate on spec­trum usage after ana­log TV fre­quen­cies free up.  We see the wind­ing road but we are not sure about which side we need to turn the han­dle. We have too much infor­ma­tion that is gar­bled ( by those who do not wel­come change ) and this is affect­ing our effi­ciency to make good decisions.

3) Dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy : born to disrupt

“Dis­rup­tive inno­va­tion is a term used in busi­ness and tech­nol­ogy lit­er­a­ture to describe inno­va­tions that improve a prod­uct or ser­vice in ways that the mar­ket does not expect, typ­i­cally by low­er­ing price or design­ing for a dif­fer­ent set of con­sumers.” agan from Wiki.

As mis­siles replace artillery, the tele­vi­sion — movie the­aters, dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy always pointed to a gen­eral mer­chan­dize man­u­fac­tured around the world by many com­pa­nies. Only Moog and a few com­pa­nies had the dis­rup­tive­ness to pro­vide replace­ment like  organs to syn­the­sizer, which in turn was man­u­fac­tured by Roland  with many com­pa­nies to follow.

I see Apple’s iPhone/iPad and Google’s Android plat­form hard­ware a com­bi­na­tion to be replac­ing paper fax and all forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion int he near future. Far fetched? When has a inde­pen­dent com­pany pro­vided a tech­nol­ogy so dis­rup­tive that it changed every­thing around it? Many times. Hei­del­berg print­ing is one to name a few.

Take a look at Wiki’s “Emerg­ing Tech­nolo­gies” and you can see what to expect in the near future. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies

So a smart­phone with a good net­work con­nec­tion and twitter/ustream is a cat­e­gory killer? Yes, if the qual­ity rises, it can poten­tially put some news sta­tions out of busi­ness by broad­cast­ing direct to view­ers. Far fetched? Surely not so far fetched, edu­cated medieval men believed earth to be shaped like a square.

Does all of this apply at all to Japan ? No, because Japan­ese bureau­crats hate and can­not com­pre­hend sud­den change, unless it is planned way in advance, and must each finan­cially and socially ben­e­fit by such change, in a nut­shell it takes time to plan for change. Until the 90’s eco­nom­i­cally strong Japan, it was man­age­able, but  as a result of  inde­ci­sion and false eco­nomic expec­ta­tions set by the sys­tem, it col­lapsed and now is in no shape or form to resist change. Many coun­tries face the same dilemma now after the Lehman Shock. Wel­come to the Wall of VooDoo.

Refer­ring the non change to tele­com, spec­trum and other laws so impor­tant to have a sec­ond look to make avail­able for mobile. Softbank’s FTTH for every home makes sense if they all pro­vided some­thing like the FON to allow local­ized wire­less in any loca­tion to cover a remote area. Land line is cru­cial to this.

Con­tent? As con­nected peo­ple influ­ence how remote peo­ple should work once con­nected, then it can seep thru to cre­ate a sus­tain­able industry.

What am I try­ing to say?