It was only a few decades ago that the majority of the population formed their opinions from a single newspaper, radio station, or TV channel.

At the office, or at school, almost everyone knew what was reported on the news the prior night, or what happened on The Ed Sullivan Show, and we collectively saw more eye-to-eye.

This is no longer the case in 2025, especially for the adaptive younger generations who have embraced new technology.

These days, we are glued to a multitude of apps on our smartphones, each of which takes up a portion of our attention.

For better or worse, this means the collective values and beliefs we used to share are disappearing, and being replaced with more niche opinions that are formed by the social media content we choose to subscribe to.

What kind of content is available to us?

Podcasts and Blogs

We have seen an explosion of podcasts over the past decade. Companies like Spotify now host anywhere from 6-7 million of them, where anything from sports to political and cultural topics are discussed.

There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the Internet to subscribe to as well. Here on Hive alone, you can read content posted to dozens of communities, and get short-form content from a multitude of front-ends.

YouTube

In addition to the millions of podcasts and blogs, you can also subscribe to anywhere from 50-100 million YouTube channels.

Are you a Christian, Liberal, Conservative? There are thousands of channels you can subscribe to, and each content creator has their own unique perspective and opinion of the world.

Social Media

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc, also exist with their billions of creators.

Rather than forming shared values and beliefs with our fellow community members or countrymen, each one of us is forming our own unique perspective on the world, depending on the content creators we subscribe to on the Internet.

This especially applies to a platform like X or Hive, where censorship isn't used to keep everyone in line.

Cryptocurrencies

Last, but certainly not least, money itself is being fractured.

A lot of the population still rallies behind their national currency, whether that be the US dollar, the Euro, the Yen, or something else. These fiat currencies are still a big part of our identities - but that's changing.

Nowadays, early cryptocurrency adopters are starting to identify more with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hive, or one of the thousands of other tokens that are powering decentralized communities.

There isn't much to stop this trend of money decentralization, especially when you consider how traditional fiat is collapsing under the weight of its own debt, and older generations are gradually being replaced with younger ones.

AI Summaries

Between blogs, social media and cryptocurrency, the battle for our attention has never been fiercer. These days, many of us are suffering from information overload, and we need a solution.

Rather than manually reading or listening to all of this endless information, we can instead feed it into AI models, and then ask (inference) those models with fine-tuned questions to get the specific answer we need at any given moment.

The power to synthesize information like this used to be limited to the big tech companies, but with the advent of decentralized data, storage and compute power, anyone will soon be able to build their own AI models and inference them by themselves.

We cannot deny that this process is taking away a bit of our humanity though, as we no longer need to lend our attention to a full blog post or an entire podcast. Instead, we can ask AI to summarize it, and compare and contrast it to a sea of other related content.

Until next time...

Thanks to a combination of smartphones, social media, and cryptocurrencies, we are transitioning from a group mindset into a decentralized one.

Instead of the population being collectively focused on a single radio or TV station, we are dividing our collective consciousness among millions (if not billions) of different content producers, and crypto tokens.

The full impact this will have on humanity is yet to be determined, but it will likely cause the fracturing of our collective national mindsets, and lead to the formation of more decentralized communities in the coming years.

If you found this article interesting, be sure to check out my other posts on crypto and finance here on the Hive blockchain. You can also follow me on InLeo for more frequent updates.

Sources

Students on Smart Phones Image [1]
Cryptocurrencies Image [2]