Michael Crichton Predicted Media Demise

Fifteen years ago, the author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, etc.), published these words in one of the first issues of a brand new San Francisco magazine called Wired:

“I want to focus on another dinosaur, one that may be on the road to extinction. I am referring to the American media. And I use the term extinction literally. To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace.”

Crichton, who passed away recently, may have been off the mark a bit in his timetable, but in the larger sense he has proved to be prescient. Consider his evaluation of the quality of most mass media reports, circa 1993:

“The media are an industry, and their product is information. And along with many other American industries, the American media produce a product of very poor quality. Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk. So people have begun to stop buying it.”

He then noted that media companies seemed clueless about the technological challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet (there was not yet a Web.) The article was a short one, just a page in length, and it was adapted from a speech he had given in April, 1993. But his prophesy rings true in these closing days of 2008.

An industry analyst recently stated: “More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the U.S. won’t exist in print, e-paper, or Web formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business…” And a similar fate awaits network TV and radio, books and the magazine industry.

They will adapt or they will not survive.

With Crichton’s passing, we have lost a writer whose visions of the future, presented mainly as fiction, enriched our culture immeasurably. It is simply too bad that the arrogant management elites at traditional media companies dismissed his warnings of 15 years ago. Had they heeded his advice, and begun the transformation to a digital future then and there, they would be far better positioned to survive this economic recession than now is the case.

Thanks to Louis Rossetto for reminding me of Crichton’s article.