Yet statistics from the book industry suggest that book-buying is on the rise. One would like to think that it's a good sign, but I find it hard to square with my own sense which is reaffirmed for me, every day in the world, that reading, by which I mean reading more than the newspaper or a book on gardening instruction, is in trouble. It's not extinct, but there is a new set of pressures on it. A large bookstore chain took out an ad in this weekend's New York Times boasting that it provides 150,000 channels in a 500 channel world. I think advertising strategists are very cunning, and they're looking for the language of appeal.
Channels now represent something very different than books.
I think there are two main features of this revolution that are key. First, more than the other revolutions and innovations, this one incorporates previous ones. It calls upon phone and screen technology, bringing together separate little revolutions that have already happened. Secondly, the rate of change has greatly accelerated, and we collectively are in a position where something which is rather enormous in its impact is being pushed at us over a short span of historical time. If you take the arrival of the automobile, which is now exactly 100 years old, you'll see that we had a few long decades to gradually see the automobile encroaching before it overwhelmed us.