A LONG TIME AGO, IN THREE-MARTINI LUNCHES FAR, FAR AWAY:
Thirty years on: A failed media response to the emergent digital world
➡️The year 1995 was an ominous time for mainstream news organizations, a time that presaged cutbacks, layoffs, and decline hastened by the emergent online world.
The threats of the #internet and world wide…
— W. Joseph Campbell (@wjosephcampbell) April 28, 2025
Of course, there are many precedents for those who bet quite wrong on emerging technologies. In 1977, Arthur C. Clarke described the skepticism in many quarters regarding the arrival of the telephone on the centennial anniversary of its invention:
Man is the communicating animal; he demands news, information, entertainment, almost as much as food. In fact, as a functioning human being, he can survive much longer without food — even without water! — than without information, as experiments in sensory deprivation have shown. This is a truly astonishing fact; one could construct a whole philosophy around it.
So any major advance in communications capability that can be conceived can be realized in practice, and that same advance will come into widespread use just as soon as it is practicable. Often sooner; the public can’t wait for “state of the art” to settle down. Remember the first clumsy phonographs, radios, tape recorders? And would you believe the date of the first music broadcast? It was barely a year after the invention of the telephone! On April 2, 1877, a “telegraphic harmony” apparatus in Philadelphia sent “Yankee Doodle” to sixteen loudspeakers — well, soft-speakers — in New York’s Steinway Hall. Alexander Graham Bell was in the audience, and one would like to know if he complimented the promoter — his now forgotten rival, Elisha Gray, who got to the Patent Office just those fatal few hours too late…
Gray was not the only one to be caught out by the momentum of events. When news of the telephone reached England through Cyrus Field’s undersea telegraphic cable, the chief engineer of the Post Office was asked whether this new Yankee invention would be of any practical value. He gave the forthright reply: “No, sir. The Americans have need of the telephone — but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
In 1998, nine years after Tim Berners-Lee created the When the World Wide Web, soon-to-be Enron advisor Paul Krugman was succinct: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”