Thats' the attention-grabbing headline from a Wired magazine story by Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) and Michael Wolff and it's delightfully provocative...
The Wired issue bases itself around that theme, and if you need an antidote to the waffle preached there, have a read of What's wrong with 'X is dead' from The Atlantic.
They observe that "The problem is Anderson's assumption about the way technology works. Serious technology scholars long ago discarded the idea that tech was just a series of increasingly awesomer things that successively displace each other. Australian historian Carroll Pursell, in reviewing Imperial College London professor David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old, summarized the academic thinking nicely:
An obsession with 'innovation' leads to a tidy timeline of progress, focusing on iconic machines, but an investigation of 'technology in use' reveals that some 'things' appear, disappear, and reappear...
And they close by noting that "Anderson's inevitable technological path [described in the article] happens to run perfectly through the domains (print/tablet) he controls at Wired, and away from the one that he doesn't." Funny that.
Best response I've seen tho was this one via Twitter from @ironicsans: “Just got my Web Is Dead issue of Wired. It came several days after I read all about it plus pro and con arguments and analyses. On the web."
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