My senior thesis at Kalamazoo College was about cable television regulation. A burning issue of the 1970's and 80's was the ability of cities to regulate local cable providers. The private cable companies needed access to the public right of way and in return the cities required that channels be set aside so the citizens of their town could have free access to this growing communication medium. Hence, public access television was born. It was an amazing concept since the ability of the common person to communicate broadly in their community had always been limited by the high cost of distribution (whether by radio, TV or print). But today, with the internet, this issue from 30 years ago is permanently dead.
The Wall Street Journal last week had an article about writers taking their book directly to potential readers. One woman had tried, without success, for ten years to persuade New York publishers to print her book. So in July of 2009 she published the book herself, online, and has sold 36,000 copies through Amazon's Kindle e-bookstore. We all have the ability to broadly share our thoughts without restriction. This ability comes with enormous potential and enormous responsibility.
If Gutenberg could time travel from 1439 to today, what would he think?
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3 comments:
He would say, "What is this world coming to!" My friends say they still want a "real live book" in their hands. When we die off, there won't be any more.....
I think Guttenberg would probably wonder how he jumped forward in time, and if we could find out how he did it, then we could solve the mystery of the nature of time itself! But he'd also probably be very impressed by the new KFC double down. It's one of our society's most impressive accomplishments.
I can't remember a time without internet. When I was watching old family videos, I remember thinking, "wow, none of those people are thinking about their e-mail, texting on their cell phone, or updating their blog!" So weird.
So amazing - all the changes. However for some of us we are having a very difficult time keeping up. HELP ! Even the language is changing. So glad I have kids and grandids who help me figure some of it out.
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