- Jan 2018
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medium.com medium.com
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Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
I remembered one time I asked my 15 year old cousin on why he reads newspaper headlines every morning instead of just browing his twitter feeds for news. His reply was quite staggering: "I don't believe that anyone can explain something in just 280 characters or less. They may deliver the point, but surely they are missing something. A small part. It may be crucial or it may not be. But I chose the later. It's always nice to have more rather than just enough."
So actually there's hope for millenials.
Unfortunately, not all of them are like my cousins. Majority of them only want to know "what's happening" rather than "why is it happening." And for that, 280 characters is enough.
And if they are not busy enough to find out why is it happening .. they watch the video while doing their dishes.
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meaning that pretty soon the only web publishers that could thrive were those who could afford to keep tweaking their technology to keep up in this new arms race. After just a few years, this became a rich-get-richer economy, and incentivized every smaller publisher to standardize on one of a few publishing tools in order to keep up with Google’s demands. Only the biggest content providers could afford to build their own tools while simultaneously following the demands of Google’s ever-changing algorithm.
This happens nevertheless of Google and technology. This thing happened before internet was created, when a small grocery stall has almost zero customer because the chain grocery store has arrived just a mile away. This is just how economy works. And for changing it, it would need a great amount of government's play and regulation, which would be very difficult to execute.
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But given that companies ranging from AirBNB to Uber have relied on their status as “tech companies” to systematically shirk inconvenient laws in each new city they enter, we can expect that at least one of these food companies entering the market as part of the “tech industry” are going to similarly find the rules around sanitation and inspection too onerous and use their tech status to evade health regulations.
This would be a difficult matter, even if the world creates a norm or governments create specific laws which regulate "tech companies", it just won't catch up to how technology is changing.
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blog.medium.com blog.medium.com
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But I think there is power in the notion of a book, its thingness, and the Web can perhaps learn how to encapsulate, in the way a book does, a discrete thing, a bounded set of ideas.
This would be tricky as the web is filled with million of users with million of different ideas that may or may not undergo the complex process a book did, especially acquiring and editing. It would just be a bundle of ideas that overlap or even have no connection from one to another.
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www.niemanlab.org www.niemanlab.org
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So, R.I.P. The Blog, 1997-2013. But this isn’t cause for lament. The Stream might be on the wane but still it dominates. All media on the web and in mobile apps has blog DNA in it and will continue to for a long while. Over the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over. No biggie, that’s how technology and culture work.
I agree. It is not that blog is dead, or that blogging is no longer an activity worth doing outside Facebooking, Instagramming and Tweeting, or that bloggers are no longer exist. I would say that blog, blogging and blogger are expanding. They just exist in different platform (like Facebook and Pinterest), with different method (people who rant on Facebook .. isn't that blogging?) and as different people (Instagrammers, Facebookers, etc).
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