It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. In the year 2014, people have access to a breadth and depth of information unimaginable in an earlier age. Everyone contributes in some way. Everyone participates to create a living, breathing media escape. However, the press, as you know it, has ceased to exist. The fourth estate's fortunes have waned. 20th century news organizations are an afterthought, a lonely remnant of a not-too-distant past. The road to 2014 began in the mid-20th century. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at the Surin Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, invents the worldwide web. 1994 sees the founding of Amazon.com. Its young creator dreams of a store that sells everything. Amazon's model, which would come to set the standard for Internet sales, is built on automated personalized recommendations, a store that can make suggestions. In 1998, two Stanford programmers create Google. Their algorithm echoes the logic of Amazon. It treats links as recommendations, and from that foundation powers the world's most effective search engine. In 1999, Tivo transforms television by unshackling it from the constraints of time and commercials. Almost no one who tries it ever goes back. Year, a .com startup named Pire Labs unveils Blogger, a personal publishing tool. Forenster launches in 2002, and hundreds of thousands of young people rush to populate it with an incredibly detailed map of their lives, their interests, and their social networks. Also in 2002, Google launches Google News, a news portal. News organizations cry foul. Google News is edited entirely by computers. In 2003, Google buys Blogger. Google's plans are a mystery, but their interest in Blogger is not unreasonable. 2003 is the year of the blog. 2004 would be remembered as the year that everything began. Reason magazine sends subscribers an issue with a satellite photo of their houses on the cover and information custom tailored to each subscriber inside. Sony and Phillips unveil the world's first mass-produced electronic paper. Google unveils Gmail with a gigabyte of free space for every user. Microsoft unveils NewsBot, a social news filter. Amazon unveils A9, a search engine built on Google's technology that also incorporates Amazon's trademark recommendations. And then Google goes public. A wash in new capital the company makes a major acquisition. Google buys Table. 2005 in response to Google's recent moves Microsoft buys Forenster. 2006 Google combines all of it to Google's services. Tivo, Blogger, Gmail, Google News and all of its searches into the Google grid. A universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds, always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google grid or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone, to create, as well as consume media. 2007 Microsoft responds to Google's mounting challenge with NewsBotster, a social news network and participatory journalism platform. NewsBotster ranks and sorts news based on what each user's friends and colleagues are reading and viewing, and it allows everyone to comment on what they see. Sony's e-paper is cheaper than real paper this year. It's the medium of choice for NewsBotster. 2008 sees the alliance that will challenge Microsoft's ambitions. Google and Amazon join forces to phone Google's on. Google supplies the Google grid and unparalleled search technology. Amazon supplies a social recommendation engine and its huge commercial infrastructure. Together, they use their detailed knowledge of every user's social network, demographics, consumption habits and interests to provide total customization of content and advertising. The News Wars of 2010 are notable for the fact that no actual news organizations take part. Google's on finally checkmants the Microsoft with a feature of the software giant cannot match. Using a new algorithm, Google's on's computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a news story for every user. In 2011, the slumbering for the state awakes to make its first and final stand. The New York Times company soos Google's on claiming that the company's fact-stribing robots are a violation of copyright law. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court, which on August 4, 2011 decides in favor of Google's on. In Sunday, March 9, 2014, Google's on unleashes Epic. Welcome to our world. The evolving, personalized information construct is the system by which our sprawling chaotic media escape is filtered, ordered and delivered. Everyone contributes now from blog entries to bone can images to video reports to bull investigations. Many people get paid too, a tiny cut of Google's immense advertising revenue proportional to the popularity of their contributions. Epic produces a custom content package for each user using his choices, his consumption habits, his interests, his demographics, his social network to shape the product. A new generation of freelance editors has sprung up, people who sell their ability to connect filter and prioritize the contents of Epic. We all subscribe to many editors. Epic allows us to mix and match their choices however we like. At its best, edited for the Saviest Readers, Epic is a summary of the world deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst, and for too many, Epic is merely a collection of trivia, much of it and true, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational. But Epic is what we wanted, it is what we chose, and its commercial success preempted any discussions of media and democracy or journalistic ethics. Today in 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. In feeble protests to Google's on-site Germany, the Times has become a print-only newsletter for the elite and the elderly.