The Quickening Decline Of Newspapers

Alan Stewart Carl, a moderate blogger, writes: "If the fall of the newspaper business is inevitable, the question is: what does that mean for society? The Internet allows for practically infinite discovery, but it invariably fractures us into subgroups of subgroups based around personal interests rather than the historical connections provided by physical community. Newspapers, on the other hand, promote those traditional connections, giving the community a common source of information and providing a base of commentary and knowledge not tied to any specific subgroup. In a world with only the Internet, we’d all be looking at different content (radically different, at times). What does that do to our sense of unity and our ability to find common ground with our neighbors? Will we cease to be meaningfully connected through physical community and reorganize ourselves in communities based on specific interests? Am I not already more invested in the readers and writers of this blog than I am in the people living ten miles from me? And, what’s the consequence of that?"