Keep your hat on

Kirk Vonnegut used to tell just the punchline of an old joke. "Keep your hat on," it went. "We could end up miles from here."

I have just realized tonight that, not only do newspaper people not know where journalism is heading in the internet age, no one does.

And that is a level playing field.

Thanks to Paul Westerdawg for linking to this today, out of the blue, on the 9th anniversary of my coming to work at The Macon Telegraph:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. ...

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. ...

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.