The World 2.0
* I can’t remember the last time I heard a busy signal.
* The Guiding Light has gone off the air after 72 years. I used to watch that show with my grandmother when I was ten.
* An MSN article predicts that, due to the competition from virtual, online colleges, traditional brick and mortar universities and colleges will disappear in the next 10 – 20 years.
* Newspapers are becoming extinct in the wake of the internet’s glut of “information.”
* Youtube currently has more hours of programming than the collective hours of the three major network stations since television’s inception.
These are all startling realizations I’ve had over the past week. Most of it’s been lurking around for ages anyway, but congealed and then hit me in a single moment of shock. I feel a sense of possibility and doom simultaneously. I could go on about each of these points individually, but I wanted to put them down collectively into one place to mark the moment. Of course there are many, many more observations that could join this list. But for now, these will suffice.
Busy signals have disappeared due to voice mail and call waiting, a phenomenon that happened somewhere in the 90s. Perhaps we could think of it as an early step in the direction of 24/7 accessibility and connection via new communication technologies. Although, looking backward, I suppose we can say the same thing for the invention of the telephone, telegraph, printing press, and writing itself. Still, the loss of the busy signal bespeaks a “jacked-in-ness” that I don’t think those older information technologies share.
Soap operas are disappearing left and right, something easily explained by a double dynamic of a bad economy and a dwindling audience. There is a host of reasons why soaps are no longer relevant. Some say the genre is just worn out. Certainly the increase in the number of women in the workforce has had a major impact on viewership numbers. Soaps have aged with their fan base and have had a hard time attracting younger viewers. Soaps (along with other standard television fare) are more costly to produce than reality television, thus the proliferation of stupid programming. A 2005 Soap Central article discusses the strained relationship between Soaps and the internet. One of those tensions is directly caused by the internet’s success in turning consumers into producers. The same phenomenon explains the death of the newspaper, something which we could use reams of paper (or screens of text) to discuss.
The possible death of colleges and universities disappearing was probably the most chilling realization for me, not only because my job is ultimately endangered, but also because I cannot imagine that learning as a quest for knowledge is promoted in a consumer-driven environment. Already institutions of higher learning are suffering under the shifting emphasis from knowledge for its own sake to technical knowledge for the sake of a job.
I learned about the MSN article that suggested impending doom from the POD discussion list. It’s a fascinating bit of speculation that warns about how students will be able to create a mix and match degree from multiple online sources. It mentions that most universities and colleges now offer online classes, which devalues the face-to-face education. In other words, the lack of respect given to “virtual” degrees will disappear as more and more respectable institutions offer virtual classes. Again, the whole 24/7 accessibility and connection comes into play. Is it a good thing that anyone can get a degree?
Some other things I’ve been pondering lately is whether Amazon or Google is Skynet, the implications of cloud computing, the ultimate disappearance of the desktop computer as more and more people switch to “office suite 2.0,” or online applications and storage, the upcoming release of Google Wave, and the whole wide world of tagging. Wow. Tagging. That’s radically mind-altering.
As I ponder these changes, I think I know how my grandfather must have felt living over the span of time from horses to spaceships.
Related posts:
Guiding Light goes off the air as two of their main female characters commit to each other…how many soaps have lesbian leading ladies? (say that 3 times fast) Olivia and Natalia…check out http://www.venicetheseries.com
The woman who played Olivia and some others kept the storyline going by creating a virtual soap opera…