"Creative Destruction"

I get all of my news from the Internet.  I’m going to be upfront about it.  In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” he stresses that people no longer have the attention span to read through entire articles – and this is another great example!  By the time I got to the graphics in this article, I was struggling to focus.  I got the main idea, and I could have gotten it in 140 characters or less.  The beauty of getting news from the internet is that you can pick and choose what to read. (Here's an example - if you like this first paragraph, you can choose to click on read more - although at this point you can already see the main idea of this blog post!)

As smart phones become more and more prevalent in our society, I definitely see traditional media becoming much less relevant.  Smart phones allow a person to work all the time – which is unfortunate, but true.  Since people are so busy, there will be less and less time to actually sit down and watch the news.  It’s much easier to multitask, perhaps by opening up CNN’s app while on the bus to work, or checking your twitter feed during your carpool.  I would like to make the argument that people will still be listening to the radio in their car, but most people can hook up their iPods to their car now, or they have satellite radio with hundreds of channels tailored to their musical wants.  In many cases, TV, newspaper and radio will no longer be people’s preferred message to get their news! 

In an article in Newsweek (note –a magazine whose article I read online) economist Joseph Schumpeter calls the time we are in a time of “’creative destruction,’ as the Internet crashes like a tsunami across entire industries, sweeping away the old and infirm and those who are unwilling or unable to change.”  This article claims that newspapers had pseudo-monopolies on the information business for years – that is, until the internet came along to wipe them out! 

My mother will often begin telling me about something that’s happened in the news and I’m always quick to stop her.  “I know mom, I read about that hours ago!” I’ll say.  I get most of my news through my iPod touch.  I read my twitter feed which contains friends, news sources, and celebrities.  If something extremely important is happening, one of the 500+ people I follow is sure to have tweeted about it.  I have the apps from my local news station and WTAJ news – if there’s breaking news, I get a push notification.  If I want to watch my news, I click onto YouTube and check out SourceFed, a channel that does 5 news stories every day, totaling no more than 20 minutes per day.  In my busy schedule, that’s all I have time for! 

If I can’t get my news in 140 characters or less, I’d rather not get it at all.  Perhaps that makes me ignorant, but I feel more realistic than ignorant.  We live in a fast-paced media saturated world.  How can we expect what are now “old media sources” to keep up? 

Lyons, Daniel. "How the Internet Ruined Newspapers, TV, Music, Movies, Microsoft." The         Decade In Rewind. Newsweek, 2010. Web. 26 Mar. 2012.          <http://2010.newsweek.com/essay/a-decade-of-destruction.html>.