aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, October 23, 2005

On paradigm shifts

Lest you think that I believe that publishing will be brought down and there will be no need for libraries and that newspapers will fail and cease to exist, I quote with great admiration this clip of Ray Kurzweil discussing communications paradigm shifts:

New communications paradigms...don’t eclipse old paradigms. We see that in general; people are still pushing plows. We still have newspapers and magazines… these paradigms actually continue, but the new paradigms—blogs, podcasting—all the different forms of communication become new business models in and of themselves, and they generally expand the pie. They’re really fueling economic growth. And they’re also profoundly democratizing in my view… So I think we’ll continue to have unpredictable new forms of media that will emerge very quickly.

Emphasis mine. And movies didn’t kill theater, television didn’t kill movies, cable didn’t kill networks, and you and me TV won’t kill cable. But we can bet it will dramatically change.

The full interview, on Tech Nation with Dr. Moira Gunn from ITConversations, is a good listen.