STEVE LOHR ESSAY


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. In August, 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 a proliferation of digital media forms and fast-shifting patterns of media consumption.

So the evolutionary engine runs faster than ever before, opening the door to new and often unforeseen possibilities. “Change has changed qualitatively,” says Janet Sternberg, an assistant professor at Fordham University and president of the Media Ecology Association, a research organization.

Up, for example, sprout social networks - Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and others - that are hybrids of communication, media distribution and unvarnished self-expression. New versatile digital devices - whether iPhone or Android smartphones, iPod players and iPad tablets - nurture more innovation and experimentation.

Adaptations follow. First-year university students don’t wear watches - cellphones are their timepieces - and seldom use e-mail, notes the Beloit College Mindset List, which was released in mid-August . (The yearly list, created by two faculty members in 1998, is intended as a glimpse at the attitudes and behavior of new college students.) Instead of e-mail, young people prefer to communicate through social networks, or instant-messaging or cellphone text messages, to which their friends are more likely to reply quickly.

Americans are talking less on their cellphones. When they do talk, the conversations are shorter, according to industry data. Partly, this reflects the shift in use of cellphones more as mobile computers that communicate via written messages.

But this also reflects a subtle shift in etiquette, experts say. People increasingly use text messages and e-mail to arrange telephone calls, which are reserved for more important, complicated dialogues.

Broad swaths of the blogosphere lie fallow, abandoned. But again, this is a sign of adaptive behavior. Much of the communication on personal blogs was about “sociability” and has shifted to social networks like Facebook, says John Kelly, lead scientist at Morningside Analytics, a research firm in New York City. But professional blogs, meant for public consumption, and focused on subjects like politics and news, are thriving, Mr. Kelly notes.

The spread of mobile media devices, whether smartphones or iPads or Nooks, has led to tailored software applications that make reading text and watching video easier on small screens . So people are not viewing this mobile media through a Web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox, a central point in the Wired “Web Is Dead” article. But the books, magazines and movies viewed on an iPad, for example, are downloaded over the Internet.

Indeed, Wired added the headline declaration, “Long Live the Internet.” Similarly, the case for Facebook’s fall is that it is a cluttered Web creation when mobile devices demand sleek, simple designs.

Adaptive innovation and experimentation, experts say, is the rule in a period of rapid change . “We’re experiencing the biggest media petri dish in four centuries,” observes Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford University in California .

Media evolution, of course, does claim casualties. But most often, these are means of distribution or storage . Photographic film is supplanted, but people take more pictures than ever. CD’s no longer dominate, as music is more and more distributed online. “Books, magazines and newspapers are next,” predicts Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Massachusetss Institute of Technology Media Lab. “Text is not going away, nor is reading. Paper is going away.”

Technology is by no means the only agent of change. Cultural tastes sometimes bring quirky turns in the evolutionary dance. Record turntables and vinyl records did appear all but extinct - only to be revived by audiophiles, including D.J.’s who created new sounds and rhythms - the art of turntablism. Today, the analog devices are often linked to computers for editing .

“No one would have predicted that ? the unexpected happens,” says Lisa Gitelman, a media historian at New York University. “When we look at how media evolves, it is clear there is no single arrow forward.”

In the 1950’s radio and the movies were challenged by television. Today, traditional media companies face the adaptive challenge posed by the Internet. That challenge is not just the technology itself, but how it has altered people’s habits of media consumption. Multitasking, in the sense of truly being able to focus on more than one cognitively taxing task at a time, may well be a myth, experts say.

But it does seem to be an accurate description of people’s behavior - watching television, while surfing the Internet or answering text messages.

Attention spans evolve and shorten .

“I love the iPad,” admits Mr. Negroponte, “but my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared, as I am constantly tempted to check email, look up words or click through.”

People, every bit as much as technology, shape the churning media ecology.


JOHN HERSEY
Time for the Web to rest in peace? The new mobile media certainly have little use for bloggers, browsers and Facebook-like social utilities.