Night of the Living Tech

Night of the Living Tech Life in the media and communications terrarium, it seems, is getting increasingly perilous. The predictions of demise are piling up. Phone calls, e-mail, blogs and Facebook, according to digerati pundits recently, are speeding toward the grave. Last week, Wired magazine proclaimed, “The Web Is Dead.”

Yet evolution — not extinction — has always been the primary rule of media ecology. New media predators rise up, but other media species typically adapt rather than perish. That is the message of both history and leading media theorists, like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. Television, for example, was seen as a threat to radio and movies, though both evolved and survived.

Still, if the evolutionary pattern remains intact, there are some fundamental differences in today’s media ecology, experts say.

Strip away the headline hyperbole of the “death of” predictions, they note, and what remains is mainly commentary on the impact of the accelerated pace of change and accumulated innovations in the Internet-era media and communications environment. A result has been right a proliferation of digital media forms and fast-shifting patterns of media consumption.