blackrimglasses

“Paper is a slow, expensive, and cumbersome way to transmit news, and as online news sources mature, more and more users will find they no longer have any use for dead tree publications.”

[From Techdirt: Your Website Shouldn't Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication]

I can’t, for the life of me, understand why we are reading this in the year 2008?

So. I worked in newspapers from the age of 16 to 22. I was the first Webmaster in fact for the Orange County Register. I wrote a lot of mini-manifesto’s when I was there to vent frustrations with the glacial pace of movement, as well as frustrations that the same people who went to school, studied Marshall McLuhan and Baudrillard the same ways I did, couldn’t apply Understanding Media to their own media tools.

Plus, I also loved Futurist Manifestos.

Choice quotes from manifesti circa Ethan in his formative years (this circa 2000):

“The Internet is not a medium for the presentation of static pages of content, where you expect a user to just read it and not react. By its very construction, the Internet lends itself to people communicating with other people, and as far back as the beginning of the technology, e-mail and discussion groups formed the core of the online experience. When you provide your visitor with a “voice” in the context of your website, you are not only engaging them in a way that is much more tangible and active, but you are also promoting the notion that your site is a unique place where the user has a say in its construction. Too often websites are constructed under the “if we build it, they will come, buy and leave” philosophy. What this fails to do is engage the user in active participation, which is the fundamental model for Internet “surfing” in general. “

And hell, in high school (circa 1997):

“The newspaper paradigm is executed in such a way that growth into the new media industry is hampered by lack of resources and funds. However, with the use of a common database subsystem and a minor alteration of newsroom and newspaper development workflow, the execution of a standard print media version of a newspaper, as well as a new media (i.e. Internet) version of a newspaper could be seamless and indistinguishable from each other.”