I just read another one of those goodbye newspapers-hello new media articles this evening that caught my attention.
In Rosabeth Moss Kanter's final "Business of America" column for the Miami Herald there is little teary-eyed prose that longs for the ink on your finger days and much much prescient gazing into the crystal ball of what's coming up next.
Kanter cites the already familiar Newspaper Association of America statistics claiming that between 1998 and 2005 weekday newspaper readership dropped from 58.6 to 51 percent for adults, from 43.5 to 38.4 percent for 18-24 year olds, and from 45.9 to 36.8 percent for 25-34 year olds. Kanter argues that our present "mass media" is increasingly becoming "niche media."
It all comes down to want audiences want. For Kanter, there's a list:
New media audiences want to be more engaged and in control. They want to:
• Direct the action (video and online game players).
• Produce the package (on-demand viewing; content recorded for replay).
• Create the content (short Web films; blogs).
• Develop their own networks (e-mail communities with pirated content; news spread virally by hitting ``forward'').
But Kanter is not a "doom and gloom" thinker. Instead, she believes that "new media rarely eliminate old media; they learn to live side by side."
Will the virtual ever fully replaced the physical? Kanter doesn't think so and I'd agree. Human beings are still attached to their senses, at least for now. Just because we can live and die in cyberspace doesn't mean we have lost our sense of touch and smell.
Yes, newsprint can be stinky, especially if it gets wet. When was the last time someone tried to sniff a computer screen?