At the beginning of a new decade, it's natural to look ahead and guess what changes might be coming down the road.
But I hesitate to make any forecasts.
Because I sure never saw the last 25 years coming.
Who knew the very thing we thought was making our life better would become the thing steering us out of business?
By "thing" I mean, of course, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the Almighty, Omnipresent Computer.
And by "us" I don't mean everyone on the planet. But, still, quite a few of us, including anybody who works for a newspaper.
I remember as if it were yesterday when the first personal computers available to the common man came on the market in about 1982.
I remember it because it meant I didn't need to be tethered to the office typewriter anymore. My office could be wherever my computer was. In 1983, thanks to the computer, I moved to the mountains.
The computer makes so many tasks so much easier. It's a lot handier to write on than a typewriter and is much more forgiving. It checks your spelling and grammar. It is full of facts and information. It looks stuff up. It can help you find people and places. It has more memory than every elephant that ever lived. It stores anything and everything you might want to use later without clutter and never calls you a pack rat for saving it. It puts at your fingertips virtually every news outlet in the world. It plays music and displays videos. It allows you to write and answer letters instantaneously. What used to take a week or a month now takes a second.
But there's a dark side to all this upside.
For the past quarter of a century, the computer and the Internet it has spawned have been eliminating much of life as we've known it.
Besides newspapers, I made a list off the top of my head of things the Internet is steadily relegating to the endangered species list: books and bookstores, typewriters, the phone company and phone books, radio, television, shopping malls, magazines, video rental stores, music and music stores, the post office, dictionaries, maps and mapmakers, encyclopedias, checkbooks, day-planners and letter openers.
All of these businesses and industries were thriving in the 1980s.
For newspapers, it's easy to chart the decline. In 1984, an average of 63.1 million Americans read newspapers on a daily basis. That was the all-time high. Every year since, as Internet use continues to increase (from barely 2 million users worldwide in 1990 to 1.7 billion currently), has seen a drop by about a million readers.
The average for 2009 was 39.1 million readers — and two-thirds of those were over the age of 50.
At this rate, newspapers won't exist by 2040.
These statistics don't mean people aren't looking at the news anymore, only that they're increasingly looking at it online, where it is available faster, easier and cheaper.
More and more, they want to hold the news in their hands less and less.
And even if they do still want to hold something in their hands to read, it's becoming increasingly likely that it didn't start out in a rain forest.
Just last week, Amazon reported that over the recently completed Christmas holidays, for the first time ever, it sold more electronic books via its Kindle players than it sold physical books.
I read this fact in a column written by Guy Rundle on a Web site called theage.com.au.
Twenty-five years ago I'd have never seen Guy Rundle's column unless I'd flown to Australia and bought a copy. Now I found it with one search word — "Internet."
To me, equally as astonishing as the change wrought by the Internet Age is the fact that for so many years I could so blithely ignore the revolution going on all around me. And I was not alone. It's only been the last two or three years, tops, that newspapers have started to notice the sky is falling.
Maybe looking back is the best way to look ahead.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.