Writer for The Economist Gets Lost in a Tunnel

Link to July 13 Guardian article, "Reports of blogging's death have been greatly exaggerated".  (Spotted at boingboing)

Excerpt:   A report last month in the Economist tells us that "blogging is dying" as more and more bloggers abandon the form for its cousins: the tweet, the Facebook Wall, the Digg.

Do a search-and-replace on "blog" and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.

Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.

Memo to The Economist. "Media is not a zero sum game," says Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California. "Just because a new medium arrives doesn't mean an old medium dies out. We still have writing in an age of word processing, we still have reading in an age of video." ("In so many words: how technology reshapes the reading habit."  (American Demographics, March, 1997 by Rebecca Piirto Heath.)

And the same goes for all of our social media options.