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Thursday, November 13, 2014

What is really dead?

(wow, in a bit of design brilliance, entering in title in Blogger and then hitting enter twice publishes the post.  A blank post, with only a title, which is why some of you may get some rss silliness over this)

Okay, let's keep this short and sweet.  Can we stop declaring the death of things?  I mean concepts, I mean media.  People are still using vinyl.  You can still order a telegram delivery.  Cars did not kill horses, digital will not kill books, video did not kill radio, etc etc.  I can't tell you how many times in the last few years I've read an article about how blogging is dead written on a blog.  Tumblr is a blogging platform.  So is Facebook to some degree.  Sites like TechCrunch and HuffPost, that's debatable but the line has been blurred, they certainly are blog-like.  Twitter is a microblogging platform (among other things).  Youtube is a videoblogging platform (among other things).

Nothing dies.  I guarantee you someone right now is engraving writing on a stone tablet either to be cute or to create something designed to outlast paper and silicon.

The proper response when someone cites the death of music, or of movies, or of platformer games, or whatever, is to roll your eyes and blow a raspberry in their general direction.

It can be up to personal taste or historical analysis if you want to declare the end of an era or a zeitgeist transferal or a demographic shift, a disruption etc etc.  That's fine, and change is constant.  But seeing as how calligraphy is still widely practiced, live music is still considered a treat, and DOS and Amiga and even the NES can easily be emulated on our phones, let's stop pretending that any platform or format really dies.

Thanks,

David

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