NEW(S) MEDIA Forget the buzz words, watch for the real paradigm shift -- it takes time

There are two problems with buzz words.

The first is obvious: that oh-so-lovely, nails-on-the-blackboard way they fall on your tortured ears. No jury would convict you if you used a PowerPoint manual to beat to death the next speaker to abuse the term "paradigm shift."

The second is less obvious. Through a combination of misunderstanding and misuse, the original buzz word tends to lose its original meaning, or, worse, it comes to mean the exact opposite of what it meant initially. Take the term "hacker," for example. It was coined at MIT as an accolade for a particularly clever engineering solution. A classic hack, for example, was a prank that involved disassembling a car and reassembling it on an MIT roof -- overnight.

Somewhere in the early days of the Internet, however, hacking morphed from meaning clever engineering to clever computer engineering to breaking into computer systems, often through a technique called "social engineering." Social engineering utilizes such high-level engineering techniques as conning people out of their passwords.

So hacker has gone from a label for the most clever engineering minds at arguably the finest engineering school in the country to a moniker for adolescents with the engineering ability of a potato.

This has been the sorry fate of the term "paradigm shift."

Now, this is a term of which we've all become heartily sick. How many times have we heard some new product described as a "paradigm shift," an event so revolutionary that it sweeps away all that has gone before?

There are two points here. First, obviously, don't believe the hype.

Second, that's not a paradigm shift.

Science historian Thomas Kuhn, who coined the phrase, described a paradigm shift as the accumulating evidence of a new school of thought slowly crushing the old school of thought.

That's what's happening with new media.

Nothing is more ridiculous than the constant refrain that new media won't replace print because they haven't already -- that new media have, to put it bluntly, failed. Yet newspapers are already basing business decisions on this perceived failure, cutting back and even closing new media efforts altogether. This is the business equivalent of getting out of television in 1935 because no one owned TV sets.

Paradigm shift: the accumulating evidence of a new school of thought crushing an old school of thought.

There was an interesting graphic in the 80th anniversary issue of Forbes magazine that showed the relative speed of acceptance of a range of technologies that are now ubiquitous, such as the VCR and the microwave oven. Some took close to a century to achieve wide acceptance.

There are a couple of points to be gleaned from this. Most obviously, you'll regret bailing out now. Less obviously, judging what will be by what exists now is a little like trying to envision Jurassic Park or Forrest Gump based on watching a couple of early silent movies.

The 20th century has seen the slow movement to electronic communication: the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, satellite communications, computers, the Internet. ...

The 21st century will see the maturing of these technologies. The equation for journalists is very simple: Either we master this technology, or it will master us. It's already too true. Newspapers have died in vast numbers this century. Network news viewership has plunged.

The old realities are gone. No longer can we win simply because "we have a Goss Metroliner (or a broadcast tower) and you don't." Now people are publishing and broadcasting with little more that a couple of thousand dollars' worth of computer gear.

True, much of it sucks -- you haven't seen ugly until you've seen live 'Net video -- but they'll get better.

Think of it this way: At the beginning of this century it was de rigueur to take a mechanic with you every time you took your car out of the garage. Autos then were about as old as computers are now.

This column will focus on that transition.

Your humble correspondent is the director of the Media Center at the American Press Institute in Reston, Va. The Media Center is a New Thing at API. The Center was founded this spring with a $729,000 grant from the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation.

MIT's Media Lab dreams great dreams of technology to come -- wearable computers, for example. API's Media Center plans to dream great dreams, but we're taking as our charge dreams that can come true fairly quickly -- say, in the next five years.

That's much of what we'll discuss here; next month we'll look at the possibility of using avatars as a user interface for news.

-- Christopher J. Feola