Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Nicholas Carr stated why he thinks paper will survive for a long time in his article titled Paper Versus Pixel . He points out something that never occurred to me, that the PC did not reduce the use of paper: “The initial arrival of the personal computer and its companion printer had us tearing through more reams than ever before” But once the pixel could be exchanged is when it became a true threat to paper: “The rise of the Internet as a universal communication system seems to be having the opposite effect. As more and more information comes to be stored and exchanged electronically, we’re writing fewer checks, sending fewer letters, circulating fewer reports, and in general committing fewer thoughts to paper.” The rest of Carr’s article is his belief that just because a medium becomes popular does not mean the end of paper. And while his data on the share of e-books seeming to stagnate must be correct, I think the reason for that isn’t only due to the fact that pages in...

One of my aunts, an ex-journalist, recently asked me: “Which magazines and papers do you read?” I struggled to name any particular papers or magazines that I read. I found that weird because I read a lot. Well, ok, I surf a lot (and read a lot as a result). In any case, I wondered why then was I struggling to answer her? It struck me only later that there is such a huge impact that the Internet had made even on how I read ! Here is how that happened. When I surf using the PC/laptop, I almost always go to aggregator sites like Google News and Freshnews.org (aggregator sites show the contents from multiple sites). If I find a headline (and the first two lines from the article) that I like at the aggregator site, I click and then read the entire article. On my phone, I use equivalent apps like Flipboard and Pulse that work the same way: aggregators that I customize to display articles from sites/topics I like. Again, I click on what I like and read the article that I am forwarded to. ...