Metropolis now

Halfway through the first decade of the 21st century, we've entered a new techno-cultural age

If you have any doubts about how fast technology is advancing, look at the world from Nancy Buirski's point of view.

When Buirski founded the Full Frame Documentary Festival in 1998, she received about 100 submissions. By 2000, entries jumped to 425. In mid-December, the 2006 festival had more than 1,000 submissions to consider, 10 of them about Hurricane Katrina.

Buirski attributes the growth to greater appreciation for the documentary form -- and to changes in technology, which account for the speed with which a documentary can be made. The first Katrina submission hit Full Frame's submissions box in November, just a few months after Katrina's floodwaters receded from New Orleans.

"More and more people pick up inexpensive cameras and make documentaries now," Buirski said. "Thanks to technological advances, it's just a lot easier now."

The documentary explosion is just one part of a tidal wave of change engulfing culture and media in the first half of the 21st century's first decade. Thanks to an ever-quickening pace of technological advances, traditional lines between consumption and production have been obliterated. Once broadband Internet access hit critical mass, a paradigm shift happened with unprecedented speed -- faster and more profound than at any time since the introduction of electricity.

"I read a story the other day where someone was saying that more things have changed in the last three weeks than the last three years," Buirski says. "It's all happening so rapidly and so suddenly, it's very hard to define what is a moving target. A lot of people are finding it difficult to commit to new approaches or business models or ways of looking at things because change is happening so quickly, and they want to see where it all falls out."

More people are making and consuming more media and culture than ever, from the entire history of recorded music to current events in real time. And they're not necessarily working through or getting it from the traditional mass-media outlets.

Television networks, record companies, daily newspapers, book publishers, movie studios and radio stations all face uncertain futures, locked in a struggle for relevance or even survival. Traditional media compete with an array of phenomena that empower consumers with exponentially increased options -- blogging, file-sharing, TiVo, satellite and low-power FM radio, print-on-demand book publishers, cable networks, interactive computer games and online communities such as Craigslist.com and MySpace.com. Most of these either replace time spent with traditional media or enable people to consume it without paying.

Broadcasting is out and even narrowcasting is not enough anymore in this mobile, on-demand world. Nowadays, it's all about "podcasting" -- making and consuming very specific programming for portable playback devices, usually an iPod (and usually free).

"Five years ago, the word 'podcasting' didn't even exist," says Paul Jones, director of the ibiblio online archive at UNC-Chapel Hill. "Now, podcasting is a major part of the business plan of Apple, Microsoft and everybody else. There's no content provider -- public, private or individual -- that doesn't have a nearly free way of reaching a specific niche with their message, whether it's music, theater, a newscast or some guy rambling over breakfast."

Mass no more

In many ways, mass culture has been a product of limitations. Inevitably, people shared the same reference points when there were just three television networks (plus PBS), mainstream radio was the only game in town, movies disappeared forever after their theatrical runs and Rolling Stone was the only magazine covering popular music in a serious way. Accordingly, content companies evolved on a scale to serve massive mainstream audiences.