Who tells you what to buy

For a long time, the person who told you which phone or which washing machine to buy was usually older than you.

There were only a few places to say it: a column in the weekend paper, a segment on a television programme, a magazine that tested products once a season. Whoever held one of those places tended to keep it. They had earned it slowly, and nobody jumped the queue. A twenty-year-old in Dubai with sharp opinions about headphones could expect to wait a couple of decades before anyone printed them.

That wait has gone. The places to speak multiplied until there were more than anyone could count, and nobody stands at the door of most of them. A student unpacking a pair of headphones on camera in his bedroom can reach more people this week than the old columnist reached in a year. Nobody asked him to wait his turn, because there is no turn.

The older outlets still behave the old way. A newspaper or a channel will keep a trusted voice in its seat for decades, because trust took years to build and it is what they know how to sell. But most of the attention has moved to feeds with no such habit, and no way of holding a seat for anyone.

The effect is easy to underestimate. It is not that a few younger voices have joined the conversation. It is that a whole generation of waiting was skipped, at once, across gadgets and fashion and almost everything else people take advice on before they buy.

If it feels sudden, that is because it was. Two decades of patience disappeared in a few years.