How does social media disrupt cultural hegemony?
Across the connected world we are witnessing a tangible subversion of long standing dominance. Social media for example has achieved a remarkable success in eroding the power of previously elite media channels. One example is the encyclopaedia, long cherished as one of society's most important knowledge repositories. For years the multiple volumes of encylopaedia Britannica have graced the shelves of libraries worldwide. They are expensive, regularly in need of updating and replacing, and take up a great deal of physical space.
Enter Wikipedia - the online social encyclopedia to which everyone has a stake in. In an extraordinarily short period of time, Wikipedia has taken up pole position as the world's knowledge repository. It is now the first port of call for many, supplanting Britannica and other previously popular reference books. And when all factors are analysed, this should be no surprise. Wikipedia is popular because it can be accessed from anywhere using a web enabled mobile phone.
More importantly it is also popular because it is democratic, and breaks the hegemony imposed by commercial publishers. Anyone can start off a new page, or quickly add content to more than 14 million existing pages (and that is just the English language pages). In response, Britannica has recently announced that it will no longer publish in paper format, but will now be exclusively digital. It's probably already too late. Wikipedia has challenged the hegemony and is now the new killer application. Other killer apps are also challenging the hegemony imposed by previously dominant channels.
Other commercial companies are also falling foul of disruptive technology. Previously dominant multi-national corporations such as the photography giant Kodak have discovered that failing to respond quickly enough to societal changes can be very costly. The market position of Kodak was once thought to be unassailable. Not anymore. Kodak failed to adapt quickly enough to the rise in popularity of digital photography, files for bankruptcy and now finds itself in a very unstable financial position from which it may fail to recover. Mail companies are also discovering that e-mail and the cloud (and the capability to send large documents and images instantaneously for very little cost) have undermined what had previously been a very secure monopoly in the physical delivery of letters and parcels. What was the Royal Mail's response to the drop in physical delivery? They raised their prices. Nicolas Negroponte's prediction of a transition from atoms to bits has been realised, is disruptive in the extreme, and it is only just beginning.