Yeah, a lot of traditional media really did get clobbered by the Internet.
considers
I think that some of what did that in was access to user-driven forums and other social media. Reddit. And, well…us here on the Threadiverse.
Used to be that if you lived in a small town somewhere, you probably didn’t have much ability to connect up with people and businesses and stuff that shared your interests. Not a large pool to draw from. But you could have a magazine for a given hobby. You’d have some people expert in the field to curate material. User input could be provided in the form of letters. Companies serving the field could promote their products.
In large cities, maybe you could have a club for shared interests, meet sporadically. But outside of that, not a lot of options.
But once you introduce online forums, suddenly people with particular interests can be connected from all over the world. And while, yeah, you don’t necessarily have paid people full-time contributing content on the forum (though websites elsewhere can be linked to), there’s enough overlap that you just don’t need that.
Some of it is that companies (or hobbyists) can just put up their own websites, and they can be searched for and linked to from places like those forums. I don’t need a magazine to make me aware of company X having some new offering any more.
It doesn’t completely fill the same role, but I think that there’s enough overlap that it more-or-less replaces most things that magazines did.
And to some extent, magazines still exist, just in the form of websites with digital editions. Like, National Geographic is a thing — actually, they still do a print edition too — but they have a subscription website.
A lot of print media is dead. Magazines have shriveled up. Newspapers are dying.
I don’t think the Internet provided an equivalent replacement.
Yeah, a lot of traditional media really did get clobbered by the Internet.
considers
I think that some of what did that in was access to user-driven forums and other social media. Reddit. And, well…us here on the Threadiverse.
Used to be that if you lived in a small town somewhere, you probably didn’t have much ability to connect up with people and businesses and stuff that shared your interests. Not a large pool to draw from. But you could have a magazine for a given hobby. You’d have some people expert in the field to curate material. User input could be provided in the form of letters. Companies serving the field could promote their products.
In large cities, maybe you could have a club for shared interests, meet sporadically. But outside of that, not a lot of options.
But once you introduce online forums, suddenly people with particular interests can be connected from all over the world. And while, yeah, you don’t necessarily have paid people full-time contributing content on the forum (though websites elsewhere can be linked to), there’s enough overlap that you just don’t need that.
Some of it is that companies (or hobbyists) can just put up their own websites, and they can be searched for and linked to from places like those forums. I don’t need a magazine to make me aware of company X having some new offering any more.
It doesn’t completely fill the same role, but I think that there’s enough overlap that it more-or-less replaces most things that magazines did.
And to some extent, magazines still exist, just in the form of websites with digital editions. Like, National Geographic is a thing — actually, they still do a print edition too — but they have a subscription website.