President Bush loves the new media???

I find it interesting that the old way of gathering the news is slowly but surely losing market share.... It’s interesting to watch these media conglomerates try to deal with the realities of a new kind of world. President Bush

It seems to me, after reading the above quote from President Bush, that he is either quite the visionary or incredibly myopic in his thinking.

New media of communication are rarely beneficial to those in power, more often than not leading to radical cultural changes as forms of thought which had previously been localized begin, by virtue of the new media, to spread from mind to mind.

To cite one example from the past, Gutenberg's perfection (he didn't invent it) of the printing press, broke the Catholic Church's control of the written word and eventually their control over interpretation of the Bible. Ironically, the Vatican made Gutenberg a very rich man for printing the very indulgences that, in part, led Martin Luther to rebel against their authority. Moreover, Luther's ideas, unlike those of Jan Hus or John Wycliffe more than a century prior, could be transmitted through the new media.

As the Bible was printed in local languages and many other books, such as Dante's Divine Comedy, found a wider audience people's views of the Church and the Monarchies of the time changed dramatically.

The internet has and will, I believe, lead to profound changes in society. Indeed, I think the more profound changes are still to come. It usually takes a few generations for a culture to adapt to changes in modes of communication as the older generations tend to cling to old habits.

We will see if President Bush is as sanguine about the new media in a few decades.