Around The Corner

We assembled an eclectic group of thinkers to identify the trends that will shape our future. It included an Internet entrepreneur who owns a basketball team, a mother who writes about the American family, a specialist in popular culture and an Op-Ed editor at a large city newspaper. We heard a fascinating conversation about how video games are making kids smarter, how consumers are turning into inventors and why some of us are taking longer showers. Listen to most of that discussion at TIME.com Here are some excerpts:

•THE INTERNET

TIME: Two developments seem to be on the minds of those who are watching the Internet play a central role in our lives. One is how the user-consumer has become part of the creative process, and the other one is the degree to which we are being microniched and perhaps disconnecting from one another. Is that what's happening?

STEVEN JOHNSON: There are a number of really interesting phenomena that are happening all at the same time. In the middle, you have maybe the most interesting zone, and I just saw somebody call it "the magic middle," where you have people who started these blogs on specific topics like the azalea blog, the Porsche blog, whatever passions people have. And they have basically accumulated these readerships of maybe 1,000 to 20,000 people just by doing something they love for the fun of it. And they're starting to be able to make some money because the advertising people are starting to talk to these people, thanks to Google and other companies. In that zone, you have sort of professional-amateur authorships, with authors who are sort of half pros, half amateurs, who are not quitting their day jobs, but they're paying their bills with money they receive from this, and they're building little audiences. And that's just an extraordinary thing to see happen.

MARK CUBAN: In a world where there are unlimited choices, it makes it harder to gain an audience. And so what's happening is that in the magic middle, the pro-am world, it becomes a struggle to differentiate between what's a labor of love and what's a business.

TIME: Will anybody make the case that the Internet is not taking away our sense of community, just reorganizing it?

JOHNSON: What changed--and I think this is probably fine if not better--is that we no longer have unifying pseudoevents or -experiences like we used to. Now we'll unify for 9/11, but we won't for "Who shot J.R.?" And I think that's a sign of a culture growing up, and a sign that we're not going to have fake events.

TIME: Because the Internet has made us all joiners, have you found, Andrés, that the climate for sharing opinions has become tenser?

ANDRES MARTINEZ: Yeah, I'd say it's a very competitive world out there and very partisan. But in a sense, it's less lonely, because there are more communities, and it's easier to join them.

CAITLIN FLANAGAN: But are they enriching communities? Are they good communities?

MARTINEZ: It depends which community you pick. But I think the polarization is also exaggerated. Things are partisan, but it's superficial.

FLANAGAN: How do we know that?