My usual practice, to suppress boredom on the cross-country flight from New York to Los Angeles, is to pick up a magazine or two, usually of the longer variety like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair (okay, I have a thing for Condé Nast). This time around, though, I was armed with my iPhone and Instapaper, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite programs ever. Instapaper converts web sites into text that you can quickly download to your iPhone for offline (i.e., in air) viewing. I also downloaded the entire New York Times through their streamlined iApp.

I do this regularly with articles I want to read but don't have time for, and then I catch up on the subway. But since I knew I'd be on a plane for 6 hours, I scanned some favorite web sites (including, yes, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair) and plugged them in for later viewing. Instead of dragging around a couple of heavy magazines, I simply clicked open my iPhone and got to it. The interface is simple and easy to use, and the fonts don't wreck my eyes.

If the newspaper crisis is revealing anything, it's that the Internet and portable devices like the iPhone are going to kill paper--but not, I suspect, professional journalism. We all want reliable news after all, and besides, look at how public radio fares today, long after the Golden Age of Radio fell to television. This will be tough, as with any transition, especially as news organizations adjust to the drop in sales revenue, but there's nothing intrinsic to humanity that requires that we use paper to read and write. Remember that Socrates was himself opposed to books, and until the dawn of the printing press, books were a luxury for most people.


An entire generation is growing up now with cell phones and iPods and TiVo. As I boarded the plane with my bevy of magazine articles in my iPhone, I passed a little girl clicking through a Kindle. That's when it occurred to me: just as I've never known a world without Game Boys and Nintendos, she'll never know a world without portable digital media. It's her generation that will read the news not on paper but on electronic devices, sized anywhere between your palm to something you'd prefer to rest in your lap. They'll press a button, and up will come a living version of the Times, which can be clicked through, poked at, etc., with all the ease of a newspaper but without the fuss of folding and refolding. And without the guilt of consuming all that paper.

Think of Slate and Salon, two pioneering online newsmagazines. Think of Style.com's iPhone application, and PMc, the first iPhone-only magazine. Think of the growth of portable digital media devices, like the iPhone and Kindle mentioned above, but also Netbooks and Tablet PCs and MacBook Airs. Think of Hulu.com and YouTube and the growth of video online. Think of how even museums use cell phones to lead self-guided tours. In the 21st century, we will all carry (if we don't already) devices that give us access to professional content, customized to our personal preferences and available at any time in any place. Is it any wonder that paper will die?

Personally, I love how the iPhone has reduced the amount of junk I carry in my purse. Since I spend so much time in trains and planes, I've come to enjoy reading to pass the time and learn about the goings-on in the world. The question, of course, is profitability, but don't worry--where there's a buck to be made, someone's going to figure out how to make it, even if Internet users as a whole demand freedom from expense.

Labels: 21st, internet, technology, travel