What Will Replace Newspapers?

From the WashingtonPost:

What's the Big Idea?

By John Pomfret
Sunday, April 5, 2009

There's a lot of hand-wringing these days about what (if anything) is going to replace newspapers. But for an idea of what we are going through it might be wise to look back into history, way back. The operative time frame, writes web-guru Clay Shirky in a recent essay, is the early 1500s when Johannes Gutenberg's printing press began to change the Western world.

"How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it?," Shirky asks. "What was the revolution itself like?"

The answer is "chaotic" with remarkable parallels to what's happening today as the Internet reconfigures our world. "As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think," Shirky writes, citing Elizabeth Eisenstein's book, "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change."

Experiments that seemed inconsequential acquired enormous significance. Consider Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, who invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type, allowing for pocket-sized books, which paved the way for pleasure reading and the publishing industry.

"That is what real revolutions are like," Shirky says. "The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place." Sound familiar? Who knew that when Craigslist's was started in 1996 it would re-write the rules of classified advertising? Or Youtube for music? Or Facebook for social networking?

"We're collectively living through 1500," Shirky says, "when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it." Shirky notes that this fall the Internet turns 40. The general public has been using it for less than two decades. And we've only really begun using it on a daily basis for a decade. "We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen."

Shirky thinks that newspapers as a mechanism for providing information and packaging ads are doomed. What will replace them? "Nothing will work, but everything might," he writes, slipping into California web-speak. So we need experiments and lots of them, each of which will seem as minor as the octavo volumes did in 1501.

Txting Aldus Manutius . . . Txting Aldus Manutius . . .