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Grappling with change.

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The media are seen as still grappling with sweeping technological change. Conglomerates have suffered big financial setbacks, newspaper circulations and profits are shrivelled, digital piracy is a big problem, and widely-read foreign publications that are available free on the Internet make media ownership rules pointless. But at least there's no need to worry about any lack of news media diversity: the only limit is the time it takes to read and view it all. Excerpts from evidence presented June 3.

In preparing myself for this committee... it struck me that the issues that you are addressing would be informed by the book, "When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century," by Carolyn Marvin; and Elizabeth Eisenstein's piece, "Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report," in the Journal of Modern History.

The first points out that in the early stages of a new technology, no one predicts accurately how it will workout. This was true for electricity, the telephone and radio, and later on for television and the computer. The second examines what did happen after the introduction of the printing press and traces those effects over the next 400 years.

Currently, the production and distribution of content in digital formats is the technology affecting news and entertainment media -- print, television, radio, film and music. The difference that I see between the issues that you are addressing in 2003 and the previous Senate report is technology. The technology has changed dramatically, and that has changed our understanding, even our definition, of what is included in the media, where...

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