The paper is dying

Norwegian news corporation Orkla Media has announced its decision to move resources away from the traditional newspaper in favour of online news and web-TV. Analysts have talked about "the end of paper" for decades. Is this finally it?

While readership have declined somewhat since the Internet became popular, there is no immediate threat to the strong position of local newspapers in Norway, but that might change if Orkla Media and other news corporations move resources away from paper. Who will bother to read a template-guided local paper where most of the articles are produced in some center far away? Where's the local identity in that?

And what happens to a democracy when most people only get snippets of information from the Net? No one bothers to read long, critical articles online. Web site statistics show that online readers are interested in gossip, sex and celebrities. Will we end up with a small political elite? The few people who actually bother to pay attention to what is happening? And if so, how will that affect democracy? Probably not in a positive way...

And even if you manage to get most readers online, there simply isn't enough room for ads to increase revenues, which means paying for access, which again means fewer readers.

The postmodern condition

For three years my lecturers tried to explain postmodernism to a bunch of stupid undergraduates. But I didn't really understand it until this morning, when I waddled through the snow on my way to the bus stop.

It suddenly occurred to me that snow is a very postmodern "object". Just as the example my lecturers loved about a table being a table only because we chose to define it as a table, with the qualities you'd normally expect from a table, snow is not necessarily snow.

Yesterday evening I went out to play in the snow. I made a snowman, snow-angels and got as wet and cold as if I was five again, and just as a five-year old kid I didn't want to go back inside. Snow as an object of leisure, fun and recreation.

This morning however, snow was far from fun as I ploughed my way towards a bus that never showed up, and ended up late for work, wet and cold. When you're stuck in front of a desk for the rest of the day, wet and cold is not at all fun, it is the exact opposite of fun. Yesterday's fun became today's tragedy. Snow as an object of pain, annoyance and anger.

And there you have it: Snow is the very definition of the postmodern. In itself it is ever changing, a mass of molecules that are wet, dry, powdery or sticky. And the way we see it is dependent on a number of different factors.

Conclusion: Snow is living proof that postmodernists sometimes are worth listening to (except the French ones, they are just plain annoying and impossible to understand).