For example, it's extremely difficult these days to make a living as a writer. There's simply too much good writing available on the net at no cost. Most zines can choose their content from a rich supply of material that is never paid for.

Strategically, however, the key word for getting paid in cyberspace is interaction. The software giants are now demonstrating this with a vengeance. They recognize that the number of bootlegged copies of their programs is enormous. So they lower the cost of software, but raise the rates for technical support services. Borland's Paradox, for instance, dropped from $500 to $100 for a vastly improved product. But to get access to an 800 technical support number that someone will answer in less than five minutes will cost you $250 a year, every year. In this way, they might even sell the program for $10 and still make money.

A writer, therefore, has to begin viewing his or her writing differently. The article or essay or video clip is given away; it's not the product, it's advertising for a related but a different product. On the basis of the appeal of your article, you go on to sell yourself as a speaker or seminar leader or editor of a specialty newsletter. You get paid to the degree that you can establish an ongoing, preferably person-to-person, back-and-forth communication with your customers.

The successful journalist of the future, therefore, will not simply be an employee of a large city newspaper or TV station. With the shrinking number of major dailies, this is an elite, restricted job market anyway. A writer would do better as an independent contractor who develops a niche, an area of expertise, in which he or she can become a consultant and teacher as well as a writer. Nor should writers limit themselves to the printed word. A variety of new skills will be needed-- the ability to combine text with graphics, sound and video; create documents in hypertext; format documents for Home Pages and CD ROM, etc.

Despite the impact of the creative energies bubbling up from below, the importance of the media giants in shaping the media of the future will still be decisive. The simple reason is that the massive amounts of resources involved in assembling the architecture of the global information infrastructure are far beyond the reach of local entrepreneurs. Inner city youth may make ingenious use of beepers and cellular phones, but the economies of scale needed to launch a network of satellites to sustain cellular communications is far beyond them.

But there is one arena where the small scale, hand-held new media technology can have a magnified impact: politics. If we proceed from Tip O'Neil's maxim that "all politics is local," then the usefulness of the technology already in the hands of young people becomes quite apparent. Imagine what happens when the street-based beeper-cellular mini-networks are used to get out the vote. Or think of the Rodney King video and imagine what happens when homegrown rock videos shift into the realm of political documentary and agitation. Then think of the synergy unleashed when creative breakthroughs in one part of the world are posted on the Internet, a la the Zapatistas and their Home Page on the World Wide Web beamed up to satellites from laptops in the jungles of Yucatan.

I think it’s going to be hard to predict just how these insurgencies and experiments will bring themselves to fruition. But I am fairly certain that the future of media is not going to be 500 channels of home shopping. Even if the media giants wanted to move in that direction, the dynamic interplay and conflict between the young and the establishment is bound to move things in directions that can be both more creative and more destructive at the same time. So fasten your seatbelts; it's going to be a bumpy ride.