The Financial Pain of Changing Technologies
At some point, being a wheelwright was no longer a means to financial security (unless you live in an Amish community and then you probably would not be reading this). While for centuries wheelwrights provided important services such as creating the wheels for carriages and wagons as well as repairing these wheels, as the automobile became the prevailing technology for transportation, the need for wheelwrights diminished to close to nothing. One could imagine that wheelwrights struggled with this change, particularly those whose families had been the in the business for hundreds of years. How would they make money? The first defense in this situation is to badmouth the new technology and it is likely there were complaints about rubber automobile tires and dire predictions about how those tires would never last. Then, at some point, everyone adjusts and society finds a new equilibrium.
We are, of course, at the tipping point of change across many industries and services with the internet. Newspapers, for example, are struggling. After all, while there are currently many people who think a morning is not complete without a cup of coffee and a newspaper, this group is diminishing. What is growing is the group of people who want today’s news today and who don’t want to have to get rid of a heap of old papers on a regular basis.
With one foot in the old world and one toe in the new, we lack vision. There has to be a way that what used to be a newspaper can be transformed into an information service, which is a growth industry in the world of the internet. The challenge currently is that people pay for newspapers and outside of the monthly internet service provider bill and an occasional subscription for certain types of information (e.g., Consumer Reports), most people surf freely. Adding some kind of information surcharge is difficult or impossible given that the web is just that-a loosely connected network not owned by any one entity, efforts by Microsoft and Google notwithstanding.
Right now, advertising seems to be one source of revenue on the internet, which is actually the traditional business plan for most newspapers. The question remains whether a formerly-newspaper-currently-information-service can pay for top notch journalists with internet advertising. In the immediate future, newspaper companies will downsize as they transition to the internet; yet each culture wants news that is responsive to and reflective of its own concerns and values, which translates to the fact that there will remain a need for global news reporting. How this need will be met remains to be seen. What is sure is that this transition is currently painful for many but it also promises new ways of doing things that we cannot imagine right now.
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