In media, the tools to produce and remix all kinds of media, and then to propagate and share them around the world, have become very common. Pieces of media that were once integrated can be found all over the place in new forms--audio, lyrics, video clips, etc. This creates an extremely complex and potentially rich global media environment (for better or worse). This is exactly what has happened in the financial industry.
Until the 90s, financial assets were integrated things. If you wanted equity, you could buy a stock. If you wanted debt, you could buy a bond. If you farmed wheat and wanted crop price insurance, you could buy a futures contract. These are all fairly simple financial instruments, and they are all created by large, reputable invesment firms (the equivalent of ABC, CBS, NBC, if you will). Then, in the 90s, some very mathematically savvy folk created a kind of financial asset called a "derivative." Derivatives enable you to split up other assets into their component parts, and then sell each part. So now, instead of one person owning a share of stock, one person can own the stock's volatility, another can own the stock's PE ratio relative to an index, or whatever. With bonds, one person can own the principal, another the default risk, another the coupon or interest income, etc.
If this sounds foreign and nonsensical, it's because it is. Nobody really gets it. The bottom line is that once-simple financial assets are now mixed and remixed all over the world in incomprehensibly complex ways, for better or worse (mostly worse, it seems). Unlike the really soft social sciences a la anthropology which can thrive in extremely complex environments, finance starts to suffocate under its own complexity. Contracts become incomprehensibe, prices become meaningless, and once-sound models fall apart. In consequence, we've seen the worst year in capital markets since 1937. I picked a heck of a time to start investing.
If you made it to this paragraph, thanks for humoring my random connection. I guess my point is that technology facilitiates the disintegration of all kinds of things, from vido clips to mortgages, and all of this disintegration has consequences. On the media/social science side, I'm mostly concerned that the really important information and meaning is being lost in the noise of an exploding cacophony of content. Some of the Greeks were very wary of the technology of written language. They thought that some things should just be written on the heart in an intimate connection between master and pupil, lest the medium and message become disconnected (disintegrated) over time. Perhaps they were onto something.
