From the mainstream, from an economist who has not been consumed by Web 2.whatever … representative of all those who have only given the NetWeb a passing glance or two since the dot.com bust, and who since then have only noticed the odd scare-mongering headline about how the Internet has created hordes of pedophiles or stalkers or led users to disclose all of their personal vagaries.
Yes, Mr. Krugman .. everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and the Web has already penetrated much of the daily activities of your life. And the digiwebification of almost everything will continue to happen, slowly but surely, and for better AND for worse.
It’s oddly gratifying to watch people catch up in awareness to what’s been happening all around them for the past five years. And so it goes.
It takes a long time for change to happen quickly.
Via the NY Times:
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PAUL KRUGMAN
June 6, 2008Do you remember what it was like back in the old days when we had a New Economy? In the 1990s, jobs were abundant, oil was cheap and information technology was about to change everything.
Then the technology bubble popped. Many highly touted New Economy companies, it turned out, were better at promoting their images than at making money — although some of them did pioneer new forms of accounting fraud. After that came the oil shock and the food shock, grim reminders that we’re still living in a material world.
So much, then, for the digital revolution? Not so fast. The predictions of ’90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected — but the future they envisioned is still on the march.
In 1994, one of those gurus, Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”
[ Snip … ]
Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success.
But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.
It won’t all happen immediately. But in the long run, we are all the Grateful Dead.
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