And Now The Irish News From Indonesia

Posted on March 9, 2007
Filed Under What's New |

In the summer I met with Rick Segal (the friendly venture capitalist) and Shel Israel who wrote Naked Conversations, along with Robert Scoble. I don’t know why geek culture played as prominent a role as it did in my own little life back in 2006. Perhaps because I would have loved to start up a new media enterprise and I was game to talk with anyone. Rick and Shel though did disturb me, an observation I shared with other Cork people who had their own take on it but had largely the same feelings.

Rick was of the view that the next great source of news and blogging expertise could be a villager in a remote part of Indonesia, a guy who would be delighted to earn $50 or a hundred a month, a guy in other words who would make the business model of blog aggregator B5, a Segal investment, really tick. This kind of realism somehow sat uneasily with me, though I know if you are a VC then you are looking for disruption and English speaking start-up journalists in a remote location in a foreign country would disrupt the media world that I know, if they’re good enough.

There’s also a kind of energy that infuses Shel and the writings of Robert Scoble that I find strangely troubling. I think it’s because I, we perhaps, interpret that as a universal energy that goes with the turf (suces, IT, dynamism, change, disruption) when in fact it is special to getting things done there, which in turn is why the Indonesian farmer journalist is going to have a tough time here.

My attitudes and writing don’t and won’t sell the the USA and part of the reason is I reserve my enthusiasm for abstract values and the ground that surrounds my house. A few months on and being more distant from geekdom makes me feel better in myself. My belief for what it is worth is that the impetus behind IT and its ability to change the world is slowing down. I don’t need to fear it no more.

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