Jeff Cole, Director of Annenberg’s Center for the Digital Future, predicts that print news will not survive another five years. In countries where internet penetration is more than 30%, he said, newspaper readership is markedly down. Cole cited remarkable statistics. The Los Angeles Times has lost more than a million subscribers in a few short years.
Cole’s consistent message was that lightening fast broadband internet connections have and will change everything. He cited many examples of how “things have fallen apart—“ news, music, advertising, schedules—and predicts that consolidation will happen in a mind-boggling way.
Cole’s notion that we’ll be left with five newspapers, five jazz stations, perhaps even five college freshman “Intro” classes taught by only the world’s best professors smacks of elitism. Is this grass-roots information explosion really going to boil down to totalitarian perfection?
So, what happens to the 70% of people who aren’t using the internet? How many of us even know people who do not own a computer? I do. My friend Valerie recently left her husband. There was one computer. He kept it. She can’t afford a new one. What is society’s solution for informing Valerie?
Does the price of broadband connectivity (and its associated hardware) continue to decline rapidly enough so that we can install internet kiosks in all public places? Do people who are not accustomed to using computers suddenly want to sit at a kiosk at their neighborhood market and browse the internet for news?
The answer for the computer-less, I suppose, is television news. Will TV become more instantaneous? Will CNN-like news channels bombard us in public places? Will we walk through public places and have flat panel screens sense the type of news we are carrying g on our mobile devices and adjust accordingly (ala The Matrix)?
My concern for our digital future is that as we become sensitized to instant access and “media anywhere,” we’ll lose our curiosity in the details, in the analysis, in the probing questions. Lightning connectivity is great. It can answer “who?” It can answer “what” and “where?” It can certainly answer “when?” (Now!) But can it answer the provocative “WHY?”
