In my morning scan of the news I bumped into this article over at NewsBusters.org. The article is a commentary (or really, mostly a quotation with a few parentheticals) of a New York Times editorial on the nationwide decline of newspapers.
I was thinking about this and a quote from I, Robot came to mind, "I don't know, maybe you would have simply banned the Internet to keep the libraries open." The quote implies that the Internet killed the world's libraries. However, I think the opposite might be true. I think the Internet could actually work toward revitalizing libraries over time. With reading becoming increasingly important, I think we may find motion media declining and a renewed interest in novels. Electronic books have really not caught on very well. Though, I think there will be changes to come in the print industry. I also think that in another dozen years or so the Internet will be a major source for independent motion media that will start to stomp on traditional television too.
On the other hand, with the blogosphere and other Internet news sources gaining credibility and as the opinion of traditional news sources are increasingly scorned as biased and out of touch, I can see newspapers suffering greatly. I even just proved it, I get all my news from the web. Why bother flipping pages of a paper allowing me one point of view, when I can read hundreds of different sources each with their own unique bias by flipping open my laptop?
Anyway, I make no predictions, but I think the problems are interesting. The social issues faced by my parents' generation were interesting and I think this generation is going to face some interesting upheavals of its own and this is just one of them.
