Replay: Jonathan Taplin shares Five Things He's Learned about The Future of Media and Democracy
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“I believe that media and democracy are so deeply connected that if one dies the other dies. I also know first-hand that media passes through periods of revolutionary change into periods of conservative consolidation. We are currently in a consolidation era, and, unless we are vigilant, the likely consequences are that the outlier artist … that has always driven our culture forward, will be silenced.”
– Jonathan Taplin, Five Things I've Learned about The Future of Media and Democracy
Jonathan Taplin's extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band in the ’60s, producer of major films in the ’70s, an executive at Merrill Lynch in the ’80s, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service in the ’90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. Here’s the first five minutes of Jonathan’s 90-minute class in which he shares the Five Things He’s Learned about the tenuous link between media and democracy – and what the continuing convergence of media, technology, and politics means for artists, and for us all.
Five Things I’ve Learned about The Future of Media and Democracy offers insights gained from a lifetime of wrestling with the convergence of media, technology, and politics. His class explores topics such as the impact of business decisions on collective art, the transformative effects of the Internet on media consumption and creative livelihoods, the erosion of shared facts in the age of social media, the implications of overwhelming media volume on art, culture, and mental health, and the impending arrival of the Metaverse and its implications for personal freedom and choice.
Want to better understand media and technology’s growing existential threat to our democracy? This class is for you.
Jonathan is the Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and author of The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock and Roll Life and Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy which was nominated by the Financial Times as one of the Best Business Books of 2017. His latest book, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto exposes what he calls “the great con job of the twenty-first century—the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism—being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society.”
Jonathan has produced music and film for Bob Dylan and The Band, George Harrison, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Gus Van Sant and many others. He currently sits on the boards of The Authors Guild, Americana Music Association and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Council on Technology and Innovation. His commentary has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Medium, The Washington Monthly and the Wall Street Journal.
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