The New York Times reporter seems to do a better job than the experts queried by the Pew Research Center on foretelling the future on the Internet. Just as important is the kind of changes to the Internet and content that no one seems to have talked about. The experts seem to think of the Internet as a place that people go to, or a thing they visit periodically. That is increasingly less the case, and not just because, according to the Internet analyst Mary Meeker, some people now check their smartphones up to 150 times a day. Location-aware devices, wearables like health monitors that beam info to the computing cloud, and the sensor-rich world all mean that the habits of the Internet have blown out across the world.
I guess that means newspapers in hardcopy. Because many who read the news on the web, actually read news that originates in documents prepared by journalists, like the one below. But still, this is a significant shift. With more people at the bottom of the pyramid in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh owning mobile phones than radios, one wonders who the Internet will beat in our part of of the world: just newspapers or newspapers and radio? The Internet has become the third most popular news platform for American adults, trailing only local and national television stations, according to a survey released on Monday.