When someone asks, 'Does success make you into a monster?' I always say, 'No, it enables you to be a monster.'
Simon CowellRead
The only people with power today are the audience. And that is increasing with Twitter, Facebook, and everything else. We cater to their likes and dislikes, and you ignore that at your peril.
Interpretation
The audience holds significant power in today's media landscape, influencing content creators and businesses.
Simon Cowell's quote highlights the changing dynamics of power in the media and entertainment industries, where the audience has gained unprecedented influence through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This shift means that creators must pay close attention to the preferences and opinions of their audience, as neglecting this can lead to negative consequences in their work and success.
In practice
During a marketing presentation about the role of social media in business growth.
When someone asks, 'Does success make you into a monster?' I always say, 'No, it enables you to be a monster.'
The web's earliest architects and pioneers fought for their vision of freedom on the Internet at a time when it was still small forums for conversation and text-based gaming. They thought the web could be adequately governed by its users without their needing to empower anyone to police it.
Open platforms encourage innovation. Whenever you have a closed platform, a monopoly on commerce, and all these platform rules, it stifles innovation.
Everybody right now, they look at the current technology, and they think, 'OK, that's what artificial neural nets are.' And they don't realize how arbitrary it is. We just made it up! And there's no reason why we shouldn't make up something else.
Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.
Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) ... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.
If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.
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