Wired says the Web is dead. It's not.

Wired says The Web is Dead, but Search Engine's Jesse Brown has some perspective on all the other things that Wired has declared dead, and why the Web is still very much alive.

Wired Magazine is Dead

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Anonymous

Amazing dude…!
Phreaking fantastic :)
2k

I think you’re all forgetting: “cases the death of a subject when declared by Wired” causes the death of a subject when declared by Wired.
John Greg

Wired says:

“You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad â€” thatâ€™s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times â€” three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflixâ€™s streaming service.”

Well, actually, no I don’t, any of that. We may all be retarded wanna-be luddites without knowing it, but no, neither I nor any of my friends do any of that — with the possible exception for some Facebook (but via PC and Internet).

Wired magazine has been so narrowly focussed and full of itself for years now that I am quite surprised it is still published. I guess, after all, rabid fanboise represent a large enough fiscal demographic to maintain it.
- Ito Kagehisa
  
  Although I agree with you, I am just chiming in here to say that “rabid fanboise” really ought to be a fancy drink, one of those ones with crushed ice and multiple colors in it.
  - RREugen
    
    It actually is. In Borogtavia.
    
    As they say, helfefrk!
    - Ito Kagehisa
      
      Helfefrk? Is that High Borogtavian? I only know common Borogtavian, and only the profanity really.
      - RREugen
        
        Yeah, right there with you, comrade. I admit I have used the bourgeois slang but I have forgotten ALL the words, embraced the Ideal (Farfazuttska!) and now only use Common myself.
        
        (PS – isn’t every word in the damned common a profanity, really? Farfazuttska my ass, the Count is not dead!)
  - arikol
    
    I dunno…
    
    The Rabid (Apple) Fanboise would probably only contain pre-approved ingredients, the drink is stylishly devoid of any colour (clear) and served in a very fancy cocktail glass so we can be a bit snobbish.
    
    mmmmmm.. waiter, get me a dry martini, please ;)
    - Anonymous
      
      And will cost 50-90% more than all other comparable cocktails….
      - Anonymous
        
        Only in that you can get $5 or $20 wine.
        
        Wouldn’t nec. call them ‘comparable’ products though.
        
        Ah well; some people don’t buy into false-economy, I don’t call that fanboyism, I call that economic sense :p
- romulusnr
  
  UH… RSS feeds info from web pages, yes? And links you to web pages.
  
  Pandora is usually accessed via its web page.
  
  Last I checked Facebook was… a web page. So was NYT online.
  
  “Wired always did have this tendency to overstate the stupid.” – M. Yesowitch
Anonymous

News sites do this all the time, BoingBoing has ‘TV is Dead’ and ‘The Netbook is Dead’. Yea, Wired went a bit OTT but it made for some great comedy.

Also, that was some badass green screening. And when I say badass, I mean bad.

Commenting is Dead.
Anonymous

I guess Prince is now writing for Wired.
Anonymous

Wired sometimes publishes some really great stories (ex: Joshua Bearman’s story about the jewel thief a few months ago), but the magazine is so tired. A big part of that, for me, is the assumption that we all do the same things, as John Greg pointed out. It’s written from a very focused niche perspective that thinks that everything it does is awesome, and if you think the same way as well.
arikol

web responds by saying that Wired is dead
Anonymous

I’m wouldn’t say the web is dead… but, for me, personally, ever since surfing the web using Mosaic it has always been about the written word. E-mail has always been about the written word – which, frankly, has always been my best form of communication.

But, in the last year, I’ve noticed that nobody emails anymore – they use facebook messaging instead and my favorite blogs seem to favor videos more and more. (Of course, I can’t back this up with numbers – it’s just a feeling – and suffers from the logical fallacy of small sample, but, well, take it as one random opinion.)

There is an inevitable convergence that is happening between the TV and web… which is what I got out of the Wired article.

No, the web is not dead… but it is becoming more video-centric – so, the response is, fittingly, on video so I don’t have the pleasure of reading this on a blog but, rather, I have to hear somebody read their blog to me on youtube.

Maybe it is just a personal thing… but, at this point, I think we’ve gotten to a saturation point of broadband that video is killing the rock and roll star… I mean the web as we know it. Knew it. A www of words.
- freshacconci
  
  Email is far from dead. Within the world of academia, email is the primary method of communication. As a prof. I’ve tried different methods of communication with students and only email was consistent. And as student myself now it’s the same thing: all communication is email. Facebook seems so unprofessional. I don’t know about the corporate world but other types of office environments are still pretty much email and phone driven. Social apps are for socializing.
- Moriarty
  
  I’ll just add a contrary data point and say that I haven’t noticed any decline in email. Personally and professionally, it’s my primary communication tool.
  
  Of course, I’m not on facebook.
- jackdavinci
  
  It’s the web sir, but not as we know it…
  
  I agree, most personal emails are ending up on facebook. And blogs have gone a bit overboard with video (and flash ads!). Really, if the same information can be presented as text it should be. There’s no reason for me to have to wait for a video to load and watch people speaking for five minutes when I can read the same amount of text myself in 30 seconds. And even if a video is, truly needed, there should be a good description of the content so I can judge whether it’s worth loading.
- Melanie Strong
  
  “My favorite blogs seem to favor videos more and more.”
  
  Yes, they do seem to. And I hate it. It’s so much easier to read the info and still look like you’re being productive at work (I’m constantly “researching” something). Once a video is posted, I’m out. I can’t watch 10 videos a day but I can read 50 blog posts in between work.
  
  I think all videos should be transcribed into comic panel form.
  - Ito Kagehisa
    
    Agreed, Ms. Strong! I don’t even watch the videos produced by people I like (Xeni Jardin being a good example).
    
    I read extremely quickly from long practice, but videos have to go at a normal conversational pace – and the ones that try to “break the wall” with nauseating camerawork and strings of sentence fragments punctuated by sound effects usually just end up butchering the informational content without increasing the speed of transmission.
    
    Heavy use of computing and networking hardware today means typing and reading text. Mice and videos are far too slow.
ToddBradley

Did any of you actually read the two articles in the magazine? It sounds like most of these comments are rebuttals of the misleading title of this Boing Boing quasi-summary, without addressing the real point of either of the real articles.
Marshall

Wired was born dead, always a bad, bad marketing driven chimera of Mondo 2000 and Popular Science.
- Anonymous
  
  Mondo2000:Wired :: Illuminatus!:AtlasShrugged
  
  … or,
  
  Wired is like the masculine version of Sex and the City. Fifty-year-old wanna-be socialites desperately clinging to the idea that anybody cares.
Lucifer

The use of “… is dead” is dead.
tedric

Like the video, but Blockbuster is very nearly dead. Meanwhile, my campus bookstore sells floppy disks on the shelf next to the 500Gb portable hard drives.
Aloisius

I would love to see how these specialized apps deal with the humble hyperlink in a post-web world.

I start up my twitter app and there are dozens of URLs for me to click on including to services which have special apps – but it doesn’t load those apps, it loads a web browser.
bibulb

Of course the Web’s dead – didn’t Push kill it back around ’97/’98? Wired had a bunch to say about that, as I recall.
tyger11

Wired won’t be around long enough to report on the Web’s death.
Anonymous

Uh, I actually get the magazine. While I haven’t read the article in full yet, it presents two opposing views: the web is dead, and the web is not dead. Sure it’s a sensationalist headline, and this video proves that they love them, but I don’t really think that this video or the hateful comments are fair.
- Teller
  
  “the web is dead, and the web is not dead.”
  
  meow/notmeow
- freshacconci
  
  What “hateful comments”? Point just one out. Why is it that whenever comment threads become critical, someone pipes in about haters.
romulusnr

If Wired’s graph is to be believed, that means DNS (i.e. hostnames) died in 1995.

On the other hand, Blockbuster is almost dead. So, 9-3 not 10-2.
dreamfish

The influence of Wired magazine peaked around 2000. The world has moved on but Wired hasn’t – I’m surprised it’s still going (a couple of years ago I actually bought a copy and found it almost unreadable).
Brainspore

Wired makes a lot of inaccurate predictions, but at least they also have a history of reexamining and even mocking those predictions later down the road. As others mentioned, one of the first major rebuttals to “The Web is Dead” came from Wired itself.

I still think the magazine is a good read overall. If you want accurate predictions of the future go find yourself a time machine.
mdh

I haven’t read WIRED since about 1997. I had no idea it was still in print.
Anonymous

It’s funny. I have an old book put out by Wired Magazine called “Reality Check” which is supposed to be “the real future” from the year 1996.

It says that in the year 2010 we have robot surgeons in a pill, smart drugs (intelligence boosting pills), orgasmatrons (!), VR sunglasses (we’ve had those since 2009), one fifth of us are buying our groceries via ‘teleshopping’, our gasoline is based on hemp, smart fabrics are mainstream (since 2007), one fourth of us have ‘smart homes’ (since 2006), there’s effective hair loss prevention (since 2006), we have self-cleaning toilets (since 2006), we have fleets of cockroach-sized robots scurrying around cleaning our houses (since 2005), a universal organ donor animal (since 2005), commonplace holographic medical imaging (since 2004), fat-destroying pills (since 2002), an AIDS vaccine (since 2002), and gene therapy for cancer (since 2000). Oh, and the CD is dead. So is the book.

I’m personally looking forward to 2015, when all of our food comes in pill form.

I guess I should just be happy that I live in an AIDs-free world with effective cancer treatment where super-sheep grow replacement organs for me that are installed by tiny robots I swallowed while insectoid robots do my dishes.

How much of it is right? Almost none of it.

There’s not a whole lot about Wired that has ever been right. When I was a lot younger, I would marvel at all the things that were soon to be ‘reality’ but it didn’t take very many glossy, 70% advertisement-filled issues before I realized they were full of crap. Techno-hipsters with an occasionally interesting speculative article or interview.
Anonymous

Be sure to check out Rob Beschizza’s excellent analysis of the misleading graph used in the Wired article.
JayConverse

Rabid Fanboise would be a great name for a rock band.

(regards to Dave Barry)
Anonymous

“The Web as We New It in Y2K is Dead” would be a better title for the Wired article.
Anonymous

Didn’t we cover this a month ago?

The whole premise that www based communications are dying was moronic then and it hasn’t stopped being stupid in the intermediary time. It represents a much smaller percentage of data being transferred than it used to. Almost all of that data is accessed through websites or coordinated using the web at some point.

Perhaps the web is dying, inasmuch as a species dies as it evolves into another organism. The web isn’t what it was 15 years ago, but it’s not dying. It’s simply changing.

And please, please stop saying the app. It’s an application.
Anonymous

Blockbuster just declared bankruptcy.
EH

Wired writes for an aspirational demographic, the fantasy You. You’re supposed to think worse of yourself if you aren’t participating in the consumer habits they espouse. What, you don’t have an iPad? That’s why your job sucks and your kids don’t understand you.
robulus

I’ve been a subscriber to Wired for years now. The fact is every few months they trot out a ridiculously hyperbolic cover story, and more often than not it dissolves into semantics, oversimplifications and generalisations.

I don’t let these little grabs for market share disturb me too much, because it’s still one of the best looking mags in print, a constant source of inspiration to me for sheer design, and if I stopped my subscription I’d miss out on little gems like the prototype super soaker last month, which was just awesome.

Plus as a web developer, I kind of have to take every call they make seriously until proven otherwise, like a 000 (911) operator.

And it’s a fact that mainstream consumption of internet content is trending toward commercial streams, and I’d be an idiot not to be factoring that into my medium term business plans.
Anonymous

I remember when Wired was fresh and relevant. Even nowadays, every now and then it has a great story, but the last few times I’ve visited I’ve found all the stories on the front page are about the same standard as Popular Science (don’t get me started on them, my ’70s issues show how far THEY have fallen) is nowadays. IE, outlines devoid of any real intelligence, condensed into bite size bits for the uneducated who wish to feel knowledgeable.
Powell

Wow. WIred got powned.
Anonymous

Just for the record (and since this discussion has become a trial of Wired itself) I thought I’d pop in to say that I’m an enthusiastic reader of Wired and I really appreciate that somebody still pays real journalists to do long-format stories about technology. At their best, they’re the best.

At their worst, they can get kinda hacky in conjuring up “big idea” cover stories, and that’s what I thought deserved a tweak.

But Wired Magazine is as alive as the Web, and I hope it stays that way.