50 things that are being killed by the internet
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Examples:
5) Punctuality
Before mobile phones, people actually had to keep their appointments and turn up to the pub on time. Texting friends to warn them of your tardiness five minutes before you are due to meet has become one of throwaway rudenesses of the connected age.
Texting is not "the internet".
The ubiquity of free, hard-core pornography on the web has put an end to one of the most dreaded rights of passage for teenage boys – buying dirty magazines.
A right of passage is an agreement that someone has the right to pass through a certain area of land (usually to get to their own land). A rite of passage is a ritual. The author no doubt meant the latter.
10) Watches
Scrabbling around in your pocket to dig out a phone may not be as elegant as glancing at a watch, but it saves splashing out on two gadgets.
Again, phones != internet. Phones had clocks on them long before they had web access.
This could have been a moderately interesting article, but unfortunately it was just gimmicky hot air.
3) Listening to an album all the way through The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There's no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will "album albums" like Radiohead's Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?
11) Music stores In a world where people don't want to pay anything for music, charging them £16.99 for 12 songs in a flimsy plastic case is no business model.
34) Mainstream media The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News in the US have already folded, and the UK's Observer may follow. Free news and the migration of advertising to the web threaten the basic business models of almost all media organisations.
40) Undiscovered artists Posting paintings to deviantART and Flickr – or poems to writebuzz – could not be easier. So now the garret-dwellers have no excuses.
46) Staggered product/film releases Companies are becoming increasingly draconian in their anti-piracy measure, but are finally beginning to appreciate that forcing British consumers to wait six months to hand over their money is not a smart business plan.
* Local bank branches, thanks to Direct Banking (e.g. HSBC Direct, ING Direct)
* Local realtors, thanks to the likes of http://redfin.com
* Local and Community colleges, thanks to the likes of http://straighterline.com
* Credit cards and Banks as the sole distributor of unsecured credit, thanks to the likes of http://prosper.com
And so on...
Are there fewer local bank branches today as compared with 10 years ago? Maybe (though I'd like to see the data), but is it due to online banking or just industry consolidation?
Are there fewer realtors? Almost certainly, but it's also almost certainly all about the real estate bubble popping, and virtually nothing to do with Redfin.
Are local and community colleges being killed by straighterline.com? Ummm...no. Maybe someday, but not now. College attendance is actually probably up as compared with 10 years ago.
Prosper.com and other P2P lenders are interesting, but 99.9% of people have never heard of them and still rely on credit cards and banks for unsecured credit, so they're hardly killing anything.
All of these kids on it are trampling the grass.