Ghost in the Wire

One of the more consistent hype narratives attending new media technologies is that of displacement and obsolescence, the idea that a new medium will remove [or] replace an older, related medium, and in so doing send that old medium to the junk bin of history. Most of the time, perhaps even all of the time, this particular narrative ends up having little relation to the eventual historical reality, and yet the same story gets trotted out whenever tech-writers or tech-users need something quick and dirty to say about a new technology. Some recent examples: the typewriter will kill writing, computers and hypertext will destroy book culture, blogs will replace online newspapers, and now, the most recent entry, podcasts will "turn radio into a dusty fossil."

And yet. None of these concerns/predictions have turned out to be true, though some have come significantly closer than others. The sublimation of handwriting to the typed word is probably the closest this narrative gets to laying any claim to accuracy. People still learn and practice handwriting, using it for special occasions or venues, like diaries, travelogues, personal letters, or greeting cards, but it is certainly practiced less, and some practices and some professions predicated on proper handwriting (like the master penmens, who were paid to draft important documents) have been eliminated. But still, handwriting hasn't been eliminated as an art; rather, it has morphed into a different symbolic register, now symbolizing the "personal touch" not found in the easy flow and mass production of the word-processed word. The reasons why writing gave way to typing in so many professional situations - the potential illegibility of the script, the slowness it brings to composition - is now the mark of a certain symbolic capital awarded to handwriting, a mark that comes about because typing frees up handwriting to do more than provide the normative, visual means of transmitting the word.

The other examples don't even come this close. With the Half-Blood Prince still flying off shelves, it's hard to say that either hypertext or video games have ended the culture of book reading. Newspapers are everywhere, with blogs largely parasitic off of their reporting efforts. And fear not, podcasts will not replace radio broadcasts any time soon.

So why is this claim so often incorrect? Well, a couple of reasons.

1. The displacement narrative confuses the current function of a medium with the medium itself. In effect, it reduces the potential of a medium to its operational economy. Typing puts word to paper more efficiently than does handwriting, and so handwriting will soon be pictured next to the dodo in the annals of history, or so the theory goes.
2. It ignores the importance of temporality in assessing mediation. Radio has the advantage of "live" broadcasts - commonly referred to now as "real time" - while podcasts do not. Podcasts can fulfill some of the functions of radio, to be sure, but they cannot catpure its rhythms. Those rhythms matter, as they determine the potential and the reception of particular media.

Now, if you carefully limit the displacement narrative to cases in which you appreciate more than mere functionality and look for matching rhythms, you have a much stronger claim. Podcasts have the very real potential of displacing talk radio by providing a flood of talk-radio competitors, whose podcasts can counter the unidirectional flow of radio with a flow that adds in user-controlled start and stops, something increasingly valued by the TiVo generation. And video really did kill the radio star, precisely because it provided the supplement of physical beauty and presentation while matching radio's rhythm.

So tech-writers, how about it? Can we go for a bit more specificity? Pretty please?