Online News and Print’s Future Essay -- Technology Computers Essays

Online News and Print’s Future The Internet’s influence on our lives has spread throughout. Researching, shopping, job searching, and more can all be done with a keyboard and a few clicks of a mouse. But this ease of use casts a shadow on the future of printed information. The Web’s instant knowledge has changed our reading and writing habits and has made print media seem old-fashioned. One of the first industries to lead the change was journalism. As the Web expanded in the mid 90’s, online editions of popular newspapers surfaced and opened a new field for seeing and telling the world's events. Even before the Web boom, the advance of another technology had already started to threaten print newspapers’ survival. In his essay â€Å"Deadline,† Nicholson Baker shares his frustrations with libraries who destroy newspaper archives in favor of microfilm backups. For years, he tried to buy as many of these collections as he could before they were destroyed. He says in the essay, â€Å"Sometimes I'm a little stunned to think that I've become a newspaper librarian†¦But at the moment nobody else seems to want to do what needs to be done† (Baker 33). As libraries adapted the new technology, they felt less of a need to keep the old style. Disregard for newspapers took on a new form with the growth of the Internet. Journalism and the news have frequently taken on new forms as communication technology advances. Beginning with oral tradition, friends and family use to tell the news to each other without mass audiences or recording instruments, like pen and paper. But as new technologies emerged, the early methods declined in usage. One such shift happened in Socrates-era Greece when writing culture overtook oral culture (Birkerts 63). As m... ...lied. Using it like it's print media won't do any good. Champions of old media need to realize that before they declare doom. Works Cited Baker, Nicholson. â€Å"Deadline† Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. Ed. Evelyn B. Tribble and Anne Trubek. New York: Longman, 2003. 9- 34. Birkerts, Sven. â€Å"Into the Electronic Millennium.† Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. Ed. Evelyn B. Tribble and Anne Trubek. New York: Longman, 2003. 62-74. Mitchell, Stephens. â€Å"Complex Seeing: A New Form.† Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. Ed. Evelyn B. Tribble and Anne Trubek. New York: Longman, 2003. 418-442. Sosnoki, James. â€Å"Hyper-readers and their Reading Engine.† Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. Ed. Evelyn B. Tribble and Anne Trubek. New York: Longman, 2003. 400-417.