We get a lot of proclamations about the future of media, many of which involve the death of one particular medium or another. For example, a week or two ago Wired magazine ran a story proclaiming that “The Web is Dead.” The article title is deliberately provocative, designed to get as many people buzzing about it as possible. (You doubt me? Check out the new “True Blood” cover of Rolling Stone magazine.) The article itself, co-authored by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, is not really as inflammatory as it seems at first glance. It simply makes the point that the Internet is making the move towards mobile devices, and these devices often depend more on custom apps rather than a general purpose browser for delivering content.
But as good magazine articles generally do, behind all the bluster there’s an interesting premise, which is not so much that the Web (or the Internet) is dying, but rather that it is changing.
And that’s the premise of this interesting article from the NY Times – how old media don’t so much die as evolve into something new. The casualties, writer Steve Lohr notes, are more means of distribution than content. He quote Nicholas Neroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab as saying, “Text is not going away, nor is reading. Paper is going away.”