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walkitoutNot really just paper pushing. But everyone who existed because of logistical delivery difficulties: limitations on the broadband spectrum, the expense of running cable to households, the cost of printing and delivering (books, magazines, newspapers, CDs, DVDs).
Everything suffered from nibbling: movies got nibbled on by TV and home re-play (VCR and follow-ons), music got nibbled on by format changes, radio, satellite, cable music. Broadcast got nibbled by cable. Printed shit got nibbled on by photocopiers, home printers (and mimeographs, before that). Then again, a lot of the nibblers created new, expansive markets for the conglomerates once they readjusted.
It's easy to forget, when people are panicking about cities losing their sole daily, that cities used to have multiple editions of each of multiple dailies. And they weren't thick and they didn't have distribution outside the city and you couldn't subscribe to a lot of them -- you bought them on the corner, which simplified the logistics. It's easy to forget storefront nickelodeons. It's easy to forget where soap operas started life (hint: not on television).
We're watching every last one of these conglomerates really start to topple and there's a whole lot of freaking out going on. What we are _not_ seeing is the connection between them being discussed in any detail. As R. puts it, once the bandwidth was there, this outcome was inevitable. It's so freaking expensive to deliver this stuff on hard anything (book, flimsy paper, VHS tape, LP, you name it), never mind in-person (walk-in theater, whether you sit down or not), that a big pipe will beat corporations who existed by solving the logistics better than anyone else. To Death.
And about time.
The next time you hear someone whining about something like this going away, think back to the death of ms. at the hands of Gutenberg's Monster. Guess who went out of business in that one? Yeah. Copying rooms at the monasteries. And we're all crying about that, still, aren't we?
ETA: This was going to be a note to myself to write a better blog entry on the subject. But you know? The subject sort of doesn't _deserve_ a better blog entry. It either deserves a wide ranging conversation, or this kind of passing snark and little more. There _was_ such a wide ranging conversation on The Conversation today, in the specific context of the iPod. Which goes only a very small way to explaining my hour plus on the side of 2 E, waiting for someone to bring me gasoline.
Everything suffered from nibbling: movies got nibbled on by TV and home re-play (VCR and follow-ons), music got nibbled on by format changes, radio, satellite, cable music. Broadcast got nibbled by cable. Printed shit got nibbled on by photocopiers, home printers (and mimeographs, before that). Then again, a lot of the nibblers created new, expansive markets for the conglomerates once they readjusted.
It's easy to forget, when people are panicking about cities losing their sole daily, that cities used to have multiple editions of each of multiple dailies. And they weren't thick and they didn't have distribution outside the city and you couldn't subscribe to a lot of them -- you bought them on the corner, which simplified the logistics. It's easy to forget storefront nickelodeons. It's easy to forget where soap operas started life (hint: not on television).
We're watching every last one of these conglomerates really start to topple and there's a whole lot of freaking out going on. What we are _not_ seeing is the connection between them being discussed in any detail. As R. puts it, once the bandwidth was there, this outcome was inevitable. It's so freaking expensive to deliver this stuff on hard anything (book, flimsy paper, VHS tape, LP, you name it), never mind in-person (walk-in theater, whether you sit down or not), that a big pipe will beat corporations who existed by solving the logistics better than anyone else. To Death.
And about time.
The next time you hear someone whining about something like this going away, think back to the death of ms. at the hands of Gutenberg's Monster. Guess who went out of business in that one? Yeah. Copying rooms at the monasteries. And we're all crying about that, still, aren't we?
ETA: This was going to be a note to myself to write a better blog entry on the subject. But you know? The subject sort of doesn't _deserve_ a better blog entry. It either deserves a wide ranging conversation, or this kind of passing snark and little more. There _was_ such a wide ranging conversation on The Conversation today, in the specific context of the iPod. Which goes only a very small way to explaining my hour plus on the side of 2 E, waiting for someone to bring me gasoline.