italianbeagle - The Monday Morning Memo

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But I remember saying that if the web was what it seemed to be, then magazines would surely cease to exist, because they depended on a weekly or monthly group of writers and articles, held together, by paper and staples. Take the paper and staples away, and nothing coheres in the same way. So we’re doomed, I confidently said.

But something else soon became pretty obvious to me: if images and video could be as accessible online as words, they would always win any contest for eyeballs. Visuals carry more visceral punch than sentences and paragraphs, and require less reason and effort. Words would endure, of course, but they would increasingly be spoken and heard, not written or read. The Internet, in other words, held the power to return us to the pre-literate culture from which a majority of humans had emerged only a few hundred years ago: images, symbols, memes. The art of mass deliberation, rooted in reading, reason and thinking, and only really in operation for a couple of centuries or so, was in danger of rapid obsolescence.

And that was well before social media and the smartphone.

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- Andrew Sullivan, Sept. 26, 2025

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