I was just barely 30 pages into Adam Gopnick’s Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life when I was arrested by the following paragraph:

“The frontier America of Lincoln’s youth was first of all a rhetorical society, where the ability to speak in public, at length, was central to social ambitions; giving a speech in 1838 Illinois was the equivalent of putting on a play in 1598 in London, the thing you did into which everything else flowed [emphasis mine]. (We are, by turn—and a writer says it with sadness—essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can’t play the image game has a hard time playing any game at all.)”

Ouch.

Think the woes of New York Times and other old media companies have anything to do with this?

How ready are you to port your content into the stream where nearly everything flows?

—Jonathan

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Content, Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.