Savvy Sassa: If Mass Media is Obsolete, and Pointcasting is the Future of Media, Why Would Anyone in Their Right Mind Want to Buy a Broadcast Network? (Or What Does Turner Entertainment’s Wunderkind President Scott Sassa Know That You Don’t?)

Even with the explosion from the grassroots, there’s still going to be a need for mass culture, for truly great entertainment that transcends all the little niches and links people together. So even when some guy in Akron, Ohio, comes up with a funny show, it’ll just be one in a universe of little grass-roots shows out there. How do people find it? How do they know about it? Hollywood is still going to popularize the best that comes up from below, and try to make killer copyrights out of them.

Savvy Sassa: If Mass Media is Obsolete, and Pointcasting is the Future of Media, Why Would Anyone in Their Right Mind Want to Buy a Broadcast Network? (Or What Does Turner Entertainment’s Wunderkind President Scott Sassa Know That You Don’t?)

You may have 500 channels instead of 50, but you won’t get 10 times as many people willing to pay a penny more for what they get over the air for free … If you look at the growth from 1970 to today in household income, it was a second income that fueled it. And we’ve tapped that one out. So it’s not as if this pie is just going to keep expanding. There may be somewhat more movies produced, but again, the basic pie is not going to grow that much.

Savvy Sassa: If Mass Media is Obsolete, and Pointcasting is the Future of Media, Why Would Anyone in Their Right Mind Want to Buy a Broadcast Network? (Or What Does Turner Entertainment’s Wunderkind President Scott Sassa Know That You Don’t?)

By making sure that we’re able to leverage our assets to create brands, we’re able to make people’s time more valuable. However high-tech the world gets, we can’t lose sight of the fact that we’ve got to enhance the consumer’s disposable time and make it more enjoyable. That’s the new paradigm for success.

000 000 111 – Double Agents

Encryption is not limited to a single layer. If I want to send you a secret message, I promise you that I can, without any risk of anyone else being able to decode it. I simply place an additional layer of encryption on top of the data, using an unbreakable code. Such codes need not be the wizardry of mathematicians or the result of massive electronics, but can be simple but secure.

000 000 111 – Double Agents

A society of electronic agents will be able to communicate far more efficiently than a collection of human cooks, maids, chauffeurs, and butlers. Rumors become facts and travel at the speed of light … All of a sudden, our smallest actions leave digital trails. For the time being, these “bit-prints” are isolated instances of very small parts of our lives. But over time, they will expand, overlap, and intercommunicate.

The Ecstatic Document

If one buys into the generalization that men attempt to be self-contained power centers and women attempt to be networked and connected, the change in the document paradigm probably won’t change anything at all. Instead of pushing men toward connectivity, it may just turn them into competitive knowledge jockeys. Some things never change.