These days, everywhere you look, the news is full of dire economic indicators. High gas prices. Huge heating cost increases. Creeping interest rates. But according to an article in today’s Christian Science Monitor, help may be on the way thanks to the most improbable of sources — specifically, from a newfangled, emerging technology known as the “Internet.”
What is the “Internet” and how might it magically change our lives for the better? In the article, entitled “The Internet enters a bold second act,” Mark Trumbull makes a bold prediction. “Led by the Internet,” he writes, “the high-tech industry appears to be entering a vibrant new phase of both growth and upheaval.”
Trumbull’s report on this “Internet” offers plenty of revelations — or would have, had it been written 10 years ago.
“The maturing of the Internet as an engine of the global economy is being driven by a handful of important forces,” writes Trumbull, who predicts that consumers will benefit as “prices and sizes shrink,” “information goes digital,” and “mobility expands.”
Undeterred by the dot-com crash at the turn of the century, Trumbull makes a distinction. “This is a far different boom,” he writes. “It is the Web’s sober second act, characterized not by soaring stock prices but by forces that are challenging traditional industries — from publishing to telecommunications — to adopt new business plans.”
But lest things get too sober, Trumbull injects some old-school speculative revelry into his Internet reporting. “By 2010,” he writes, “online ad revenues are expected to more than double from last year’s $9.3 billion.” (Actually, if revenues increase just 14 percent a year from now until then, they will have doubled, so the prediction isn’t as starry-eyed as it seems.) Extend the trend-line, and presumably by 2020, the Internet will have eradicated boredom, cured global poverty, and made an unmanned space flight to the moon.
In a closing flourish, Trumbull goes gaga for Google (apparently not having read Adam Penenberg’s piece at Slate yesterday, which raises an eyebrow at both Google’s business practices and its prospects). “Google embodies a whole new model of computing,” he writes. “Where Microsoft has traditionally helped people make the most of their own PC, Google wants the Internet to be a giant personal computer for the planet. It’s stated mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.'”
In the meantime, journalists like Trumbull will continue pursuing the oldest model of business reporting known to man — letting no flavor-of-the-month in the business world go unplugged.
Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.