Five Mega-Trends That Will Shape the Next Decade

MEGA-TREND #1: The Great Stupidification
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“There’s an online sucker born every minute.”

When pundits originally started yammering about the Internet creating a “democratization of information”, they talked as if this were a good idea. They forgot the lesson of history, which is that true democracy (as opposed to a republic) quickly devolves into mob rule. While the Internet has its advantages, it’s having the unintended consequence of raising the credibility of thousands of goofball theories.

Most people are pretty gullible anyway. (For example, more people in the United States believe in ghosts than believe in evolution.) However, because the Internet makes screwball “authorities” seem as valid as real scientists, it’s spawning innumerable jackass theories, which are now held as gospel truth by a large segment of the population.

Since a large segment of the public can’t differentiate between reality and Reality TV, they glom onto whatever theory makes them feel comfortable, and then, due to confirmation bias, resist any attempt to extract them from their fantasy. With a increasing frequency, such theories (e.g. the “birthers”) penetrate into the mainstream, where media whores like Glenn Beck use them to goose up ratings.

This trend impacts business in several ways. Sales of books and videos about conspiracy theories is already a billion dollar business. The craziness can also drive B2B buying behavior. For example, the Internet-spawned Y2K disaster hoax resulted in companies purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of unneeded computer upgrades.

Overall, the trend results in a public (including to a lesser extent, the professional class) who are LESS informed about what’s going on because there will be so much BS floating around and no way to differentiate between what’s real and what’s totally absurd. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of the American public.”

http://www.bnet.com/blog/salesmachine/five-mega-trends-that-will-shape-the-next-decade/13129?pg=2