rant whine 'splain espouse: Will we one day ask, "What was a newspaper?"

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Will we one day ask, "What was a newspaper?"

"In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?"

Apparently a Georgia Tech student project, EPIC 2014 [requires Flash] is an interesting visualization of what the future might hold after the convergence of traditional Fourth Estate media, technology, and social networking.

Some of the conjecture seems a little unlikely at first, but then I had to remember things like AOL buying Time Warner (btw, I'm telling it like it was, not the revisionist history that we have now, whereby the parent company has reverted to being called Time Warner and AOL is a subsidiary; let's remember that, yes, as bizarre as it seemed, it was AOL that bought Time Warner, not the other way around.)

EPIC 2014's vision of a future where traditional media has been supplanted by "participatory journalism" is not entirely unlikely. Social networking and alternative media have taken the world by storm, and it isn't likely to revert, only to continue to evolve in ways that most of us can't imagine.

EPIC 2014's vision is an interesting peek into one possible future.