Newton's laws of motion say, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

A Wired magazine article called “Snacklash” explains that in a world of bite-sized entertainment from YouTube, 50-hour-long dramas like The Sopranos, Lost, or 24 are more popular than ever.

Chris Anderson remembers, “Every abundance creates a new scarcity.”

Every time a curmudgeon complains about how things are changing, remember that change leaves room for its opposite reaction, too.

Let's think of some examples, shall we?

ACTION:

More and more and more music to choose from.

REACTION:

More need for tastemakers to tell us what's good.

ACTION:

Less venues for musicians to play.

REACTION:

House concerts.

ACTION:

Everybody getting too much email.

REACTION:

Increasing effectiveness of using anything-but-email to reach people. (Phone, SMS, snail mail, Facebook message.)

ACTION:

The push to make recorded music free.

REACTION:

Reaching people who are happy to spend money to show their dedication to an artist. (One of CD Baby's top-sellers costs $150. Many of david m. bailey's fans buy all of his albums at once, at a cost of $233.)

ACTION:

Customized entertainment online, where you only see/hear what you want to see/hear. (Pandora, Last.fm, etc.)

REACTION:

The luxury of someone else choosing your entertainment, based on what they think you need to see/hear. (It's healthy to hear other points of view.)

ACTION:

Social network, where hundreds of people you've never met are called “friends”.

REACTION:

Anti-social network, a secret site where you can't see who else is on there unless you've privately communicated a shared password. Then your “friends” can be your real friends, and you can have a better (private) conversation. (No this doesn't exist yet, but that's part of the fun of this action-reaction thing : using it to imagine what should exist.)

Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, said (via the Wikinomics blog), “If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? And what is complementary to that?”

I have the feeling this little brainstorm just barely scratched the surface, so please leave a reply here with some of your thoughts or examples on this action-reaction subject.