The Road Ahead

(6 of 8)
DYSON: I think the new avenues are effective. You don't notice them because there are more of them. Do you have to be the Beatles to be realized as a creative artist? Do you have to be Bill Gates to be a business success? The whole point of the new market is that it's much more distributed. People find tighter but smaller audiences, what we call "the long tail." It's better than having these fundamentally fictitious hits created by marketing.

MOBY: I know a guy in Barcelona who has started a company to develop algorithms to determine whether a song is going to be a hit. It analyzes music to figure it out--and they're selling it to the record companies, and it's quite effective. If you expand on that, there's no reason you couldn't have your own personal search engine that understands your taste and can instantly analyze music based on a whole bunch of different, very subjective criteria to determine whether you might like it.

BROOKS: My frustration is that as we talk about things today, we end up gravitating toward its informational structure. If you were sitting around in 15th century England and wanted to learn about what Shakespeare was about to write, the economics of the theater might enter your discussion, but it wouldn't dominate it. The structure is kind of important, but it doesn't determine.

MOBY: O.K., but cultural production always goes hand in hand with technological development. Like with the records I make. I wouldn't have been able to make them 20 years ago. It would have cost half a million dollars to make a record instead of $20,000. Now it's just me with a laptop.

GETTING RELIGION

GLADWELL: One of the big trends in American society is the transformation of the evangelical movement and the rise of a more mature, sophisticated, culturally open evangelical church. Ten years from now, I don't think we're going to have the kinds of arguments about religion that we have today. Even the fight over intelligent design, to me, is a harbinger of a trend, which is that the religious world is increasingly willing to put its issues on the table and discuss them in the context of the secular world. Let's argue about evolution vs. creation, using the framework that secular science has given us.

SHIRKY: That's wrong. Intelligent design is a stalking horse for creationism against a particular enemy, evolution.

GLADWELL: I disagree. This is part of an ongoing transformation. We will not continue to have this kind of divide between Evangelicals and the rest of society. I just went to an interesting evangelical conference, and throughout, rock bands were playing. The rock-'n'-roll culture within the evangelical world is indistinguishable in terms of the sound of the music from the rock culture that came out of a very different, irreligious secular tradition, except that the words are about Jesus--love and all that. They're not resisting outside culture, they're embracing it and kind of making it their own. I think intelligent design and Christian rock are similar. It's about taking up form from the outside and trying to Christianize it. Does the debate over evolution matter? Isn't it really a nondebate?

SHIRKY: No. It matters a lot because medicine is starting to become evolutionary, and we want to continue to have doctors who understand that.

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