It’s rather amusing to see the feeble attempts to discredit the digital revolution.
Just a few moments ago someone posted on Twitter a cartoon showing people going up on an escalator all checking their iphones.
Just one person was on the other side going down, reading a book.
The caption to the cartoon was: Dare to be different!
Of course this sort of pushback against new technology is neither new nor effective.
In fact, they are a waste of time, because most people understand and accept that while new technology brings disruption it also delivers incredible benefits to humanity.
As a publisher of information I know that only too well.
Were it not for the internet and in particular the iphone there is no way an ordinary person like me could publish an entire local news website.
To publish an old fashioned newspaper you need a lot of capital – we’re talking big bikkies here.
Last time I looked it cost hundreds of dollars to print just one page of a newspaper – I think the quote I got was around $600. Multiply that by 20, 30 or 40 pages and the picture is obvious.
You need a lot of advertisers to pay for the high printing costs and that’s not even before finding a few dollars more for trucks to pick the paper bundles and drop them off to the area distributors.
This was around 10 years ago, but I doubt much has changed.
The revolution started with desk top publishing a few years ago, but they still had to fork out for printing because there was no social media or affordable websites to deliver the news to a large enough audience to make it feasible.
All that has now changed and no matter what anyone says the business model for printed newspapers is just about busted.
Think of all the trees that will be saved because news is being delivered online instead of printed on paper – and that’s just one of the benefits.
Think of hundreds of news publishers online and how much better that is for democracy than a couple of billionaires running the show and telling us what to eat, drink and how to vote.
Now everyone has a little bit of power more than they used to have, thanks to the digital revolution.
The printed material – from books to newspapers to junk mail in our letterboxes – won’t disappear completely.
But either way the internet of things has won the war for the hearts minds of human beings.
Something tells me the iphone, Google, Facebook and Twitter are only the beginning of this revolution.
