Is ‘Googlezon’ in our future?

Like Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas future, two young journalists have been showing the news media a disturbing picture of a time that might be – a near future in which the press, as we know it, has become irrelevant.

While some say their dark prediction is highly improbable, others say that vision has already arrived.

An eight-minute video by Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan called "EPIC 2014" – a faux documentary that purports to look back from 2014 to tell how the mainstream media died – made waves at newspaper seminars and in journalism classrooms when it was released in early 2004. But when the pair released the video on the Internet – with no explanation as to who had created it or why – it made a worldwide impression.

"I love the mystery of it. I never would have done it any other way," says Mr. Thompson. Bloggers discussed who might be behind it and what message was intended.

"Judging by the number of times it was sent to me, there were a lot of eyeballs on that thing," says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif.

"We were really surprised by the intense reaction it received outside the journalism community," says Thompson, who’s now deputy editor of interactive media at the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper. While journalists often take the video as a dark jeremiad, nonjournalists often embrace it as a positive view of the media future, he says.

By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Full Story: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1219/p14s02-stct.html?s=hns