Everything is dying, apparently. (Not you, though...) Movies are too expensive to make, the record industry is failing as a result of its own greed, nobody is buying newspapers, and print book publishing is often spoken about as if it were some ailing child.
But fortunately, there's the Internet.
The Internet is changing everything, you may have heard, and in most cases it is faulted as the reason the aforementioned industries are dying or, at least, "transforming." Good riddance, some shout. Wait, I still like those industries the way they are, sob others.
In a new Internet Evolution BIG Report by Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, Doctorow explains that it doesn't really matter all that much whether we want to keep media around in their traditional forms.
"The Internet chews up media and spits them out again," writes Doctorow. "Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die."
Not everyone agrees with Doctorow's assessments, particularly where "death" to one of our beloved industries is concerned, but with regular reports on the bankrupt American newspaper industry, and the like, they're hard to ignore.
So let's assume he's right about it all, and the newspaper is about to give way to the blogosphere or some other form of digital news, and big budget movies may just die out, leaving us with low-budget films online, and people stop buying printed books, novels, in particular, having adjusted to digesting content in small bites.
What we're left with, then, is a mess of sorts.
Doctorow recognizes the imperfections of something like an e-book, for example, alluding to the fact that the e-book readers are obscenely priced for uni-purpose devices, and reading books on a computer is simply too distracting a task.
Should the newspaper die, then, as a result of advertisers pulling out, we'll be left with the blogosphere, which often declares itself immune to journalistic standards and typically thinks "fact-checking" an obsolete, discredited pastime.
The record industry, if it died today, would give way to a digital music industry dominated by Apple and accompanied by streaming music sites on the brink of death by high licensing fees and the uncertainty of ad-supported anything.
It may be the case that you (yes, you) still care for traditional media, treating what's available on the Internet as supplemental. Perhaps you subscribe to The New York Times, but also read your share of blogs. Kudos. But if Doctorow's assessments are correct, you may eventually be stuck with the latter option only.
The Web has been able to get away with lower-quality content and low-to-no standards because of its openness and, from a consumer standpoint, because we had elsewhere to turn. But should traditional media die out, are you satisfied with their online alternatives?
To read more about what's to come for media, check out Doctorow's report -- and let us know what you think on the boards:
Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution
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