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2009
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Scenario 1: Brave New World

Brave New World is a future in which radically new demand for media and multimedia will be met by radically new players with radically different business and operational models.

The primary features of Brave New World include:

• Almost by definition: the general media environment will be very diverse in both content and players.  Proliferation will take place on several levels: more content, more delivery capacity through more systems and devices, more companies delivering the content though the new channels. 
• Marketing will become more exact (vs. the mass market/network audience model of the mid-to-late twentieth century). Many companies will try to reach "zip code specificity" in their understanding of geographic markets.  They will develop techniques for targeting messages that can achive a level of granularity previously unattainable. 
• Low barriers to entry will bring many more voices into the media mix. This will include a slew of "citizen journalists," as well as academics and other professionals or experts with a high level of category-based knowledge, whose access to the production and distribution were previously much more limited.
• The influx of new participants will challenge the definitions and principles of objectivity in journalism and academic disciplines.
• While the content streams will be rich and full, individual content producers will have a hard time getting noticed.  The "fifteen minutes of fame" may be reduced to five minutes or even less.  And even those who reach an audience may only be able to hold them if they concentrate on small market segments (micro audiences).
• This is a "noisy environment" with an almost overwhelming stream of new content flowign thorugh land lines and cable, over digital terrestrical signals, satellite, wi-fi and a steady print, people will need guides.  It will just become too much to pick through or even to search.  Thus, curatorial help will be highly valued, and we are likely to see the emergence of more and more "smart search" services offered to help people wade through the clutter.
• It seems entirely possible that the ethic of Brave New World will be for-profit/commercial. Everyone is trying to get a handhold on the slippery slope, and we will admire those who succeed.  With everyone able to hang out a media shingle and start a service, we will see a new wave of entrepreneurial spirit, buoyed by an expanding marketplace. On the labor side, free-lance work become ever more common and structured, long-term employer-employee relationships will only exist in nostalgia.  Settlement of rights issues, together with the expansion of new content streams, will mean producers get paid in new ways. Changes in workplace relationships may also mean that education and health care become more individual and more "pay as you go."

When the group participants were asked to imagine "What sort of headlines would we read over the next ten years, if the Brave New World scenario were unfolding?" they came up with this listing: