I have to agree with Asi Sharabi at No Man’s Blog:
“Please can we stop killing things?
Over the last few years we’ve been all guilty of new-technologies sensationalism. Our response to the overwhelming pace of change made us believe that emerging platforms and technologies will categorically and dramatically kill everything that was before them. Search for “TV is Dead” on google and you’ll get over 2million(!) results. But is it? really? (That clever dude who wrote a book on the death of TV advertising also founded a new agency that specialises in marketing in Second Life. No, really!)
What else have we had?
Twitter is killing blogging!
Widgets will kill the homepage!
Second Life is killing Real Life!
Digital is killing advertising!
Yahoo pipes will kill the browser!
Google is killing Microsoft!
iGoogle is killing Newspapers!
Gaming is killing the cinema!
Books are a thing of the past!
Google Wave will kill Facebook!
Facebook is killing email!
Twitter is killing Facebook!
And now, the most recent hyperbole, straight from Twitter’s (AKA The Pulse) oven, I give you….
Streams are killing the web page.
Guess what. it turns out that when human evolve and construct culture(s) they have some time-attention-alchemist-like qualities whereby old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Sometimes they compete and sometime co-habit and complementary and together they evolve and we evolve. Honestly, we’re like every good parents – when we have a new baby we don’t stop loving the older one, we find time and make room in our hearts for both…;-)
True, there are some casualties (DVD did kill the VHS) and natural selection (e.g. closure of few magazines and channels), some people make less money, some people make loads new money. Things do expand and contract, evolve and change but reality is more complex and is no where near the new-technologies massacres we read about every day.
So for 2010, let’s try to avoid the trend of killing old things in favour of new things and live happily ever after…”
Of course, once again this year I am on the Dead Technolgies panel (and comedy night) at Computers in Libraries. Irony rulez.
Stephen
3 Responses
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I’ve always been a “sit on the fence” kind of girl and to me nothing has been killed. I love the new technologies but I have held on to the old as well. Yes, I don’t watch as much TV now that I have Netflix, and streaming options, but I also watch TV shows on my computer. I love books, and my Kindle. Let’s be truly Buddhist and say that nothing ever dies it is just reincarnated in a different form
When was the mainframe killed?
All too young, Nick. All too young. I missed the wake.
SA