Same same but different

Can I first just point out the obvious irony of this line:

“Will many of its noblest and most valuable functions–most forms of scholarship and research, dictionaries, encyclopedias–migrate to the computer?”

Hmm, hard to say while reading a PDF version of this once-printed page on my MacBook.

That out of the way, I’ve got to agree with the general thesis of this chapter. Over the past few years I’ve noticed that journalists love to write seemingly self-serving pieces about the future of news. They find different-but-the-same angles for the, as these guys put it, panic and euphoria of a changing landscape and run the story as often as they can get away with.

But maybe it’s not such a misuse of energy because I read them every time. Probably partly because the industry holds interest for me career-wise, but also because there’s something very human about everything this article is describing. We approach change with caution. I liked the thought that we ease ourselves into these changing media like we did with cars (perhaps inadvertently) fashioned after the horse and buggy. I hadn’t thought about that, but I have laughed before at the functionless shutter sound effect found on most digital cameras.

That was somewhat tangential. My original thought was that in one article that I read about peoples’ resistance to the changing media landscape, the author said that even Gutenberg’s printing press was met with resistance. Socrates? Or someone important/smart like that, thought it was sure to destroy our children’s abilities to remember–because we’d be writing everything down. Doesn’t that seem insane now? Books! A tool that at least in the Western world we consider essential to the educational process–the process of making one smarter.

And, to further demonstrate the point of Thorburn and Jenkins, basically the same thing is now being said about Google. Times, they may be a changin’, but they also stay the same.