Once upon a time, in a previous life, I launched myself into a limousine uninvited because Walter Cronkite was in the backseat and he was my ticket to ride. He was just about to retire, and he was kind enough to get me an interview at CBS in New York, where he was about to give up the anchor seat.
I was a punk writing a television column in Boston at the time, in 1980: for some reason my brush with greatness -- and all those hours as a critic watching but three networks -- made me think that everything in the media was about to change. In place of Walter Cronkite, a hard-news reporter weaned at a wire service, I predicted our world was about to be inundated by opinion.
Little did I know that cable television, all-news networks, The Internet, blogs, and social media were all still to come. I just had a hunch and I got a newspaper column out of it.
Sometimes you get lucky. As Bill Lee once said of Don Zimmer: "Even a blind squirrel finds a chestnut sometimes."
I have a hunch like that right now about the media and new technology. I never met the late Steve Jobs but it's impossible for me not to tie my hunch to his life and death, thereby appropriating his 25 years in the klieg lights as a both a point of departure and arrival, of darkness and of light. He had a "genius for simplicity" as the local paper put it, but that's not my point. Nor is my point that we will not see his like again. We will soon enough.
My point is that the great 20th century-plus wave of digital innovation is over, and that the next decade at least will see a period of consolidation -- of multimedia variations on a digital theme.
I know my point is contrarian and goes against Moore's Law and everything we know about technology. Technology always gets faster and better and cheaper, right? Technology always proceeds bountifully by leaps. The media follows like a lapdog. Or does it?
My hunch is that most of the enabling digital technology is already in place. We have everything-on-demand. We have tablets and cellphones and Kindles and laptops for the lapdogs. We can talk to anyone from anywhere and watch a ballgame from the middle of nowhere or watch a TV show whenever we feel like it. We can order a book or a song or a movie any time we damn well please. We are now daisy-chained by high-speed networks available in worlds both civilized and uncivilized.
The nay-sayer might say: "What about social media?" Certainly Facebook and Twitter have been the breakthrough of the last half-dozen years, and there's no reason to believe others won't follow. They say if you blink you'll miss the next game-changer.
I disagree. I believe social media is the Internet's backbone enabler of community, as fundamental as the LANs and WANs that preceded it. The transformative equivalent of social media will not just happen anytime soon, any more than we will see the equivalent of the IBM personal computer in 1982. Now that was a game-changer.
The Internet, social media, and the digital tools and toys are now in our hands, not in a sci-fi tome from Arthur C. Clarke. Just look at your Droid or your iPad if you don't believe me. Children now are born into the digital world that Steve Jobs and others like him imagined and then created. Things won't change until we replace "digital" with whatever is next.
If you don't believe me, to quote the late great Steve Jobs, maybe it's time to think different while there's still time.