Five Myths of New Media, Revisited
<p>A reader suggested that I should take a look at an article I wrote back in 1997, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/fivemyths.html">Five Myths of New Media</a>, and consider how those predictions panned out.  Good idea, here goes&#8230;</p>
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<h2>1. Business use is driving the growth of the Internet</h2>
<p>That myth is long since busted &mdash; I called it right. The action, and most of the traffic volume, are in social networking and P2P and other on-line communities not tied to someone&#8217;s line of business.  Personal use dominates even in measures as simple as tallies of broadband connections; &#8220;home&#8221; accounts vastly outnumber &#8220;business&#8221; accounts.</p>
<p>Note: I&#8217;m not claiming business use is unimportant, but then I wasn&#8217;t claiming that in my original article either.  It&#8217;s just not the main driver of volume growth today, and probably never has been.</p>
<p>In truth, I think I was actually more prescient than almost anyone else about this, at least anyone else who was willing to speak up in public.</p>
<h2>The Internet is the future of mass entertainment and news.</h2>
<p>In my prediction I was being derisive of video-on-demand services and the notion that old-media moguls could shoehorn the Internet into a dumb, centralized broadcast medium, issuing entertainment and news over an  essentially one-way pipe.  Busted: that hasn&#8217;t happened either, my negative prediction was correct.</p>
<p>Eleven years later the Internet looks like the future of news, but in a different way than I anticipated in 1997.  What it&#8217;s done instead is turned everyone who wants to be into a publisher. I didn&#8217;t make that positive prediction, but then nobody else did either.</p>
<p>So I&#8217;d say I got this half right; I was correct in terms of the questions we knew how to ask in 1997, but I didn&#8217;t quite foresee  a more radical development that would change the questions.</p>
<h2>The techno-literacy problem can be solved in isolation.</h2>
<p>Despite the more general title, I was mostly talking about the broadband-deployment problem in my original prediction.  But I  don&#8217;t think anyone would even argue the more general claim in 2008.</p>
<p>Notice that you don&#8217;t hear much squawking from the &#8220;digital divide&#8221; crowd any more?  As I correctly predicted, attempts at grandiose government interventions came to nothing and markets mostly solved the Internet deployment problem.  Free wireless Internet provided by <em>private citizens and businesses</em> has spread like crazy.</p>
<p>The big remaining deployment issue isn&#8217;t rich vs. poor, which is what the do-gooders were obsessing about in 1997; it&#8217;s urban vs. rural. Below a certain population density it&#8217;s difficult for anyone thinking about dropping in cable or fibre to recover their infrastructure costs.  I expect mesh networking and WiMAX to solve this problem during the next five years.</p>
<p>I think I got this one entirely right.</p>
<h2>On-line magazines can make money.</h2>
<p>&#8230;by subscription.  If anyone has actually managed this yet, I have yet to hear about it.  All the &#8220;successful&#8221; operations I know of are cross-subsidized by a print business or float on advertising revenue. So I was right as far as that went.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m going to concede half of this one, however, because I was wrong in the more general sense.  Slate, my example of 1997, started making money in 2007 after the <cite>Washington Post</cite> bought it from Microsoft. The advertising revenue did it.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s still the case that even specialized devices like ebook readers &#8220;cannot replace the experience of leafing through a magazine with your feet up.&#8221;</p>
<h2>Paper will be history soon.</h2>
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<p>Busted.  Obviously it isn&#8217;t, and won&#8217;t be in the foreseeable future. Displays aren&#8217;t good enough or cheap enough, or light enough, not by  an order of magnitude. The technology to make them better than paper  is now realistically imaginable &mdash; that&#8217;s a change from 1997, when high-resolution color CRTs were still pretty novel &mdash; but only barely so. It will be a long way off yet.</p>
<p>I wrote: &#8220;Internet (like other media) has a natural ecological/economic niche which it fills better than its competitors,<br />
but that said niche is different from any of its competitors. We won&#8217;t serve anyone by trying to fit the Internet on a Procrustean bed of old-media forms, nor by assuming any of them is inevitably going to be completely subsumed by the Internet.</p>
<p>One thing we can see a little more clearly ten years later is which old-media forms do look most likely to be replaced.  My post on  <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=303">Converging curves</a> cites long-term trends suggesting that general-circulation newspapers look like being one of them.</p>
<p>The learning process continues.  I was solid on predictions 3 and 5.  I got 2 and 4 at least half-right.  And I was ahead of almost everyone on prediction 1.  That&#8217;s at least an an 80% hit rate, which is pretty good in the prognostication business.</p>
