It's been around since 1835, but this July Ann Arbor News will cease publication and reopen as an online newspaper that prints a twice-weekly print edition. A curious choice of restructuring, for sure. Obviously, many lament news like this as sign that society is further self-destructing. Others have surely run down to the store to hoard copies of their precious NY Times before it too becomes a thing of the past.

I've never been sold on the idea that newspapers disappearing was quite as catastrophic as people make it out to be. I certainly appreciate the value of an in-hand analysis of world events and politics. That I get. But it's not automatically clear that we won't still have access to this kind of information via the Internet, or that new technologies won't emerge to fulfill that need. Such as an in-hand, digital newspaper that updates itself and resembles paper -- which has been proposed but is obviously many many years away.

Some have argued that investigative journalism is one of the things that has been cut back on since newspapers began to gut their budgets -- and this seems to ring true. There will be things that will change as technology shifts. And we do indeed stand to lose some things. That's for sure. But we need to grow up and realize that technological change is NOT the first sign of imminent apocalypse. We're smack dab in the middle of a radical shift in the way information is produced, shared, and consumed -- the kind of shift not seen since the invention of the printing press. It makes sense that we have anxieties about that change, as people generally do in any time of radical social transformation.

But while some of these anxieties may be well-founded, most of it amounts to a senseless moral panic. Really people: get off your pretentious intellectual, NY Times-reading, self-righteous crusade about the death of intellectualism and forthcoming end of the world. I promise that the world is not ending. And that there will be smart people still when things settle. They may just not be as able to stash a copy of the NY Times in their messenger bags to evidence their intellectual superiority.

Just my daily rant about pop culture! :)