Watching a young man who just bought himself a smartphone -- a seemingly very fast one at that -- trying to navigate through its apps had me in rapt attention. But, I was more fascinated by the fact that the very first website he was trying to access on his phone was that of a newspaper.
Wow! I thought, the young generation are indeed using to smartphones to read news on the go. Till then I had been a sceptic -- for over a decade now newspapers have been talking of turning digital and making it the cash cow.
Perhaps, it's these youth who would be the future consumers of news. So, a phone after all is not for making and receiving calls, or perhaps send/receive SMSes. That's all I do.... My phone is perfectly fine for that.
The young man must have been wondering what I was doing with a hard-bound book, 'My Brief History: A Memoir' by Stephen Hawking that I was reading. Even as I turned pages he was still trying to navigate through the apps on the phone. The newspaper website he was trying to open was way too slow, it seems. He would toggle between apps, as I could make out from the corner of my eye.
He would keep going to-and-fro from the yet-to-open website and some of the apps that he was looking to explore.
After an attempt stretching into maybe 4-5 minutes, he gave up. He then tried to open some other website that would give him something to read. And, there went an attempt to read some news... no idea how hard a news he was looking for.
Perhaps, the end is nearing for print media as we know it. I just hope the young man just has ADD or attention deficiency disorder. Not that I want to make him sick... But, probably want myself to feel better that not youth are like him.
Given that in many counties now you get to see newspaper being distributed for free on the footpaths, perhaps the digital medium I thought would help save journalism as we know it... But, not if the websites are slow or when most people have ADD or something similar to that. It's a fast-paced world!
