METal Breakfast 11/06/2010

Goodbye To Gutenberg

More than any other technology, the printing press has shaped our understanding of the world. The impact of the printed word is much bigger than we realize. For the past 500 years, human culture has been dominated by a print metaphor that began with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, a metaphor that is encoded in nearly every modern human invention, from the assembly line to packaged goods to mass media and entertainment. Our tools, our politics, our health care and education systems, and our consumer products and mass marketing are the artifacts of the Gutenberg revolution. And all of these are now undergoing a process of radical transformation, all at once.

The end of the Gutenberg era is at hand. Today's chaos and cultural turbulence signal the transition to a new era. This era will be shaped by two-way media, dynamic feedback loops, collaborative knowledge-sharing, virtualization, and ultra-flexible production. Our future will be determined by the way we manage and exploit the explosive increase in information.

Today, as the print era comes to a close, we can get a glimpse of the way our world is being shaped by new communications technology. This METal talk, by a veteran of digital media, provides vivid illustrations and metaphors to reveal the hidden power of the technology platforms that define the scope of innovation and social progress. This change is way bigger than the end of TV or 500 million Facebook friends.




This Week's Guest Speaker : Robert Tercek (http://roberttercek.com/biography/)

Robert Tercek is a prolific creator of interactive media. He has worked throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas, supervising the launch of hundreds of new programs on every digital platform introduced in the past 15 years. His credits include television shows and cable TV networks, computer games, educational software, mobile entertainment and social software. He has served in executive leadership roles at OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and MTV: Music Television. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a member of the Board of Directors of the Creative Visions Foundation.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• ken rutkowski
• robert tercek
• oprah
• mtv
• entertainment
• technology