How Ken Kurson Imagines Media in 2021

By  //  October 22, 2020

When a person has a career in media for decades, it’s very difficult not to trust their judgment. With more and more people finding themselves in media-related careers, it’s clear that there is a strong market of readers and viewers waiting to be reached by many.

Ken Kurson, a media entrepreneur and journalist, has been producing research about the direction he sees the media heading toward in the future. Of course, Kurson’s efforts are clearly mere predictions, but they are supported by hard facts.

In the next year, people are going to be online even more than they are presently. Why is this? How can people spring over ten hours a day on their devices and then increase that number? Kurson says to pull out your phone and check your personal screen time.

Is it four hours….five hours a day? Multiply that by seven and some people are spending over a day on their phones. Kurson has experience in researching media topics as he has served  as a writer for The Green Magazine; A Guide To Personal Finance, that can be found on Amazon.

It is simply remarkable how much the media has integrated itself into the daily lives of millions of people. One of the most popular social media apps, Instagram, has almost thirty million users.

Next, Twitter has a skyrocketing three hundred and thirty million users. That’s the population of a few of the biggest counties in the world. And of course, with almost three billion users, Facebook takes over the media market.

Users have used these platforms vastly for communication. It can be self-promotional, according to Kurson, but in reality, they were created off of connections.

Kurson is astounded by these large numbers of users. He believes that due to the pandemic, these numbers will only continue to grow. With more people being online and socially distant, the digital arena has provided a terrific medium for communicating.

As more and more people create accounts with these major platforms Kurson fears that in 2021 there will be some type of data outbreak.

Think about how the executives of these companies are so rich. All three of the apps mentioned above are free to download. So how are billionaires born? Kurson says the answer lies in the data.

These platforms are curating billions of different facts about people. They can see so much more than they lead on courtesy of data mining and the like.

Facebook and Instagram, now sister companies, sell the data they collect on users to advertisers. That is why when you look something up, without any social media tabs open, somehow an ad for that product lands on one’s timeline.

Kurson says that this type of technology is only going to get more and more intense and calculated. The algorithms created to capture this data have gotten so specific and detailed that it is almost impossible for users to avoid.

Advertisers pay big money to see these statistics about users. The way the business works is truly measured by the individuals using the apps and letting them see more information than they should.

Although Ken Kurson finds this a little unsettling, he understands that this data collection can be somewhat helpful in the long run. However, with 2021 slowly creeping in, it’s hard to imagine just how advanced media will become then.

There is such a passion for media relations in this next generation. As people grow up using social media constantly, it’s inevitable that many of them will want to pursue careers in the industry.

Soon, this will be one of the biggest industries in the world, if it isn’t already. The more people that make accounts, the more people will continue using these platforms for many years to go.

The data and statistics collected on these individuals will become even more valuable over time, according to Kurson. Being able to track behaviors, preferences, and schedules that people have is almost too detailed for people.

The issues that advertisers are getting sold with this information is only going to get worse as time goes on. They will know more that people do about themselves in the coming years.

The technology used to create this algorithm is very cryptic and complex. The users don’t have access to the hardware of them and are usually left unknowing how much data these apps are collecting. With Kurson still diligently doing research on the topic, he hopes the users gain more privacy.

There is a level of this type of technology when it doesn’t become impressive, it becomes terrifying. Just imagine how much they know about a person in 2020, let alone years down the line. The industry has changed in a multitude of ways and it’s anyone’s guess as to where things will stand in 2021.