Personal Brand Schizophrenia

I am just back from Brazil.  It was an amazing experience, I will write about it further when I have a little time to digest it and write about it intelligently.  I realize now that I have not even spoken about the substance of the project.  Let's just leave it at now that I am very fortunate to be able to participate in documenting a sustainable development project in the Amazon facilitated by this organization.  It was energizing (and a real privilege) to meet people who are doing so much right to improve a piece of the world through hard work, brains, humility, stamina and more hard work.

Beautiful, but not always easy

There is so much happening right now in my world, I will try to touch on a few important other thoughts today (against the advice of the experts who warn about keeping a focused personal brand--rather than corporations becoming more human, it seems as though we are increasingly assuming their attributes).

I wanted to post a link to this: Flipboard, a subtle, but important step forward in how I see us all consuming media in the future.  Media created by people you know and curated/repackaged for your consumption.

I will leave today's post with a few questions:

1.  Is there any reason to think that in the future visual media will be any more highly valued than music has become?  In China, it seems as though literally no one pays for music now.  People there are scrambling to try and create anything that people will pay for surrounding the consumption experience, especially using social media.  Indie filmmakers, is this sounding familiar? Once the bandwidth logjam is broken, and it will be broken, unless we are willing to become completely uncompetitive as a nation in the global marketplace, how will media producers stop visual media from becoming as valueless as an mp3 in China?   It seems like a survival strategy that madia producing companies like NBC/Universal are being consolidated into pipeline providers like Comcast.  As someone who creates visual media, and knows the dedication, skill and hard work that goes into its creation, this is not an easy question to ask.

2. Will the future of paid media production involve largely only a few high-end producers of technological wonders (like Batman, Ironman, etc.) which can only be produced with a lot of capital and organizational/technical expertise?  Will most of the rest of the media consumed be produced by, well, everyone and curated through Facebook, YouTube and other online social repositories?  It seems as though we are well down the path to ever-increasing media consumption, however, rather than being consumed as a separate viewing experience it will be consumed nearly constantly, in small bits, and much of it created by people we "know" (at least online).

I'm not leaving until I get my $.99 for that download