A Newspaper Asserts Content Worthless
February 13, 2015
I recall paying for a copy of the Guardian newspaper when I was in the UK a couple of years ago. My hunch is that the newspaper is still for sale. I encountered a link on a UK headline site to “The iPod Effect: How Near Limitless Storage Made Content Worthless.”
The idea that an MP3 player devalued content was interesting. I thought that newspaper entitles like quality oriented Murdoch operations blamed Google for devaluing content. I have heard speakers at conferences point the finger of blame at education’s failure to produce book readers. A consulting firm expert opined that it was the acceleration of life that nuked magazines and newspapers and reading in general.
According to the Guardian, which embraces some open source (free) technology:
If we continue to cultivate a society where even the most crafted and artisan digital items are throwaway flash sale detritus, how can we expect to continue enjoying the talented minds that create them?
Armageddon arrives and the warriors are Taylor Swift and iPhone toting troops.
I learned:
As a whole, we humans aren’t great at moderating our own consumption. As each scarce resource in human life has become more and more available, we’ve gorged ourselves until popular sentiment realizes it’s time to rebalance. Just as we hit that wall with nutrition and energy consumption, I think we’re getting there with the value of art in ubiquitous digital form. But while we adjust, we’re relying on brave creators to treat us mean and keep us keen so when we return to tough decisions, we know they’re too good to lose.
Oh, maybe this article is only about music and not newspapers. Wow, that had me frightened.
Stephen E Arnold, February 13, 2015
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