Is the stream passé?

In today's London Sunday Times, columnist Bryan Appleyard quotes David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London & author of the excellent Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 about the Internet's revolutionary qualities. “The internet is rather passé," Edgerton told Appleyard,  "It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.”

In a sense, of course, Edgerton is absolutely right. For example, much of the debate between bloggers and professional journalists about the future of newspapers has become painfully passé. The endless backwards and forwards in which everything is discussed and nothing resolved reached one of its messy little anti-climaxes this weekend, first with the publication of a reactionary op-ed in the Washington Post by a couple of big-media lawyers, then with the equally predictable response of orthodox mainstream-media bloggers like Koz & Jeff Jarvis.

But not everything about the Internet is passé. In the past, this Internet has appeared, as Edgerton says, "like television, radio or newspapers." Thus this endless debate about how "old" media would become "new" media and how print newspapers would morph into digital businesses. But, as Clay Shirky so elegantly argued in Thinking The Unthinkable, the old doesn't conveniently translate into the new and there is no certainty that newspapers will ever be reinvented. So we seem to be stuck in historical limbo, caught between the destruction of newspapers and the non-appearance of whatever it is that will replace them.

Maybe that's because most of us are looking in the wrong place. Alongside the staleness of the blogging/MSM debate, a new, more interesting -- albeit inchoate -- discourse around real-time media is emerging. Driven by daring thinkers like Steve Gillmor & John Borthwick, it suggests that the Internet is fundamentally being transformed from a controlled distribution flow of information into what Borthwick calls "a real-time stream of data". Twitter and its rich ecosystem of applications is, of course, the best example of the real-time stream. So is Friendfeed and the latest version of Facebook.

David Edgerton would probably argue that the real-time stream is another example of the shock of the old -- "just a means of communications". But in contrast with either Web 1.0 or 2.0, I think that it's a fundamentally different means of communications from television, radio or newspapers. The real-time stream not only changes all the rules and practices of traditional media, but it also transforms communications into the 21st century first mover, the thing-in-itself. Techcrunch's Erick Schonfeld gets it. He says we should jump into the stream:

So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.

Schonfeld is right. I'm not entirely clear where the stream is taking us, but surely it's better to be drowned in the torrent of real-time media that to be suffocated to death by the torturously boring debate between bloggers and journalists. Both newspapers and blogs have become passé. The stream is the new. Don't let it pass you by.

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Comments

[Jeremy Schlosberg]

The 'stream' may indeed be new but what remains passé is the internet zealot's assumption that this latest new thing is indeed the most earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting thing of all time. Hidden beneath the zealot's self-assurance are problems that may be major, and yet which in our rush to embrace the new we ignore or overlook. In the case of the stream, the big problems are lack of context and lack of perspective. If as fully adopted as real-time proponents believe it must be, the stream risks drowning measured discussion in a flow of mob-crazed obsession. Not the future I'm looking forward to, I'll tell you that.

[Richard Stacy]

Indeed. The old newspapers v blogs debate is now pretty sterile (an institutionalised debate about institutions). You and Shirky, Gilmour et al are also absolutely right to identify that the essential 'differentness' of this new information space.

The old world was about institutionalised information sources - the new is about information processes (a stream is essentially a process). And it is the shift in distribution - or rather the liberation of content from a defined and controlling means of distribution - that is driving this.

[Bill]

To use a phrase Vonnegut was fond of, get in the stream and "paddle your own canoe." That's one of the other aspects of it, at least for now. Each person must navigate the stream and choose for him or herself what data is relevant to them (not always easy given the quantity and the speed of the flow).

Interesting how technology loves its metaphors. :-)

[Eric Rumsey]

Salman Rushdie saw "The Stream" coming, in 1990 -- The Stream of Stories that he envisions is : "made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity." Sounds like he's talking about the story we'll all living every day on the Web (Stream?).

For more on Rushdie's vision, and recent stream-thinking by Nova Spivack and Peter Brantley, see: http://blog.lib.uiowa.edu/hardinmd/2009/05/15/the-web-as-a-stream-of-stories/

[mariana]

Why the title, it is obvious that is not passe, it is just starting, what you should ask instead is that if is innovation in the communication mediums pase, I might agree with this a little, what is passe is not the new way of communicating, is that we are now able to predict much better what is going to happen with it, there fore the surprise is kind of obsolete.

[Ian Thorpe]

The "stream" as a fantasy of webheads who are nourished by novelty. The current internet does not have the capacity to support such a stream (which I assume would comprise millions of people simultaneously video twittering to an indifferent world) and until a way to make money from the net is found nobody is oing to invest in building the new infrastructure.

What is really killing newspapers is dumbing down. They were pushed aside by broadcast services as the medium of choice for news a long time ago but adapted by offering more opinion, analysis and features. Withy an increasing proportion of the pupulation not easily able to absorb information via the written word nor posessed of the attention span to read a fifteen hundred word article there is nowhere for print media to go.

Twitter is hot at the moment and will remain cool until the twitterati need another fix of novelty.

[Owen]

oh come on - it doesn't have to be one or the other. To run with the stream metaphor. Some will prefer to loll on the banks and idly watch the stream flow by. Others will sit on the brink, roll up their pants legs and splash their feet. Still others will wade up and down stream a bit. And some will dive right on in. But all that water will still run down to the sea, get lost in the immersive ocean of data, get evaporated out by the sun, coalesce and condense into cloud, blow back over the land, precipitate as rain and come right back by the person sitting on the bank at some later date. Just speed that cycle up to electron migration levels.

Now, let's filet the metaphor by saying that the information you want is a fish - a salmon. Your active pursuer (twitterer or whatever) is chasing it with a harpoon. You passive observer has a net out. Eventually the salmon will return to spawn and eventually it will get caught. It'll just take a while.

The information, the news is there, just depends on if you feel the need to chase it or not - it depends on how important it is that you know now.