Where is the Internet Going in Our Society

Hello, I am Jack Prough, Melanie's husband. Melanie or Baby as most of you know her asked me to get some thoughts down for you in her Blog. I am not a web developer of any nature, but I have some philosophical ideas about the "net" and what our grandchildren will be doing with it.

A report issued today by private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson suggests the amount of money spent on Internet advertising will reach $61.98 billion, surpassing newspapers as the #1 ad medium in the United States in the next four years

This is a fairly large statement, agreed. However, consider this, the New York Times print version of their news becoming obsolete. I offer this.......

The reality of these 2007 usage figures adds up to 1,173,109,925 Internet users worldwide. Only 55 million newspapers are sold each day, 59 million on Sunday in the US, and they are published by 1,457 companies. The punch is.... The number of newspaper companies in the US is down 293 newspaper companies, which is about -17%. Online news however, is booming. 31% of all US residents read the news online 3 or more days a week in 2006. Newspapers were only read more by a slight margin, 40%. News print is consistently year over year losing the battle to online news. So maybe our great grandchildren will read about newspapers in their computer teaching modules in school.

These are clearly not necessarily bad things. The daunting reality is that the Internet has had a far greater effect on a global scale than any other form of media, and perhaps greater than most inventions.

Our children are writing their journals in Blogs. They are "Googling" more information than we ever even could have accessed in our entire childhood. The learn lessons in school on a PDA of PC. Its a very strange thing considering, we most likely didn't have a PC in our childhood....If we did it may have been a very early version like the TRS 80 from Radio Shack. In just a very short time the advancements of the PC and specifically the Internet have changed our lives and how we work, play, teach, and entertain ourselves forever.

Well, that's all for now. Hopefully Melanie will proof read this for you, that might make is legible. I know you are all used to Melanie's tag line...But sadly I have none. I will work on it for next time.

Jack Prough


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