Article: Evolving From a Print-Society to a Cyber-Society

By Naseem Javed
E-Commerce Times (Part of the ECT News Network, USA)
'It was only a hundred years ago, at the dawn of the print-society, where words, nicely arranged and neatly printed on newsprint, were sold to a select and literate few. That's how the power of knowledge and influence was fertilized in the broadsheets, sprinkled though the elite gossip machines and eventually picked by the commoners. Much later, or only a decade ago, most newspapers, weighty and tossed at every second doorstep, still carried the germination of well-branded ideas, and still carried the power to keep our societies glued.

Facing the Truth
But today, embedded in a new cyber-society, newspapers are known to carry nothing but yesterday's old news with fresh ink. They are commonly treated like unnecessary fuel for our recycling bins. This mighty medium of the classy period of the print-society is gasping for the last breath in the cyber-society of today. The days of the newspaper business are numbered.

Like the evolution of any other cultural tsunami, the denial of the newspapermen and their continued resistance to change has only prolonged this agony. Years ago, they vigorously fought against the use of color pictures as being too tacky for journalistic words. Second, they resisted Web sites as cop-outs to the new medium of the Internet, and demanded outrageous fees, but later succumbed to free deals.

Now they are in denial in accepting this as one of the final rounds in a fight to survive. Newspapers may always be with us in some form, but they will cease to serve as the principal backbone of the media.
Time to Fly Kites
What newspapers do today is not very different from what they did a hundred years ago. A great but cumbersome process started with Franklin fully relying on Gutenberg's moveable type and flat presses, but, as later fully exposed by Marshall McLuhan, this process is now simply being replaced by YOU. Now, you can do some research and write up some ideas and e-mail all of that to a selected list of people in seconds. Essentially, that's news distribution.

The noble concept of growing trees and pulping them to make paper and to further go through another 1,000 steps to bring that branch of the tree into tabloid shape to be inked, read, and further recycled is dead.'

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http://www.technewsworld.com/story/47473.html