Just in the niche of time.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff

While working on a marketing project recently, I asked a young woman in my office to help by typing mailing labels. "I don't think I've ever even touched a typewriter," she said.

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It was resolved when I realized the labels I purchased came with a Microsoft Word program code number. Rather than type my labels, the young woman word-processed them.

It was a generational moment, but it pointed out how much we are alike. Typing mailing labels isn't much different done on a typewriter or a computer. The message is the same, and the media--a typewriter and a computer--are simply an example of evolution, not revolution.

While we didn't call it that when an IBM Selectric was considered high technology, it's still word processing. The computer has enhancements, but it's ot a radical departure. Alexander Graham Bell might be impressed, but not amazed or astounded, at a cell phone; it's still a telephone.

That's why I am astonished at all the people--newspaper publishers and retailers in particular--who are so apt to think of the Internet as a radical departure. It isn't. The message is the medium and always has been and will remain so, but I guess that arguing otherwise lets the fearful and uninspired off the hook for a while.

Like many people, for a long time I have been willing to accept the axiom that the Internet is a fundamentally different new tool. As such, it means that we have to create new functions for it, and that whole new ideas would spring from its font. I've been trying for years to think differently, to wrap my internal synapses around a radically new kind of process. I imagined that at some point I would have an ether epiphany.

Well, I have had an epiphany, but it had nothing to do with ether. I realized all along that I was doing the same things I always had--searching for information, essentially--and that all the Internet really does is make my search less burdensome. It broadens my abilities but doesn't change their essential nature.

The Internet is powerful but not life-changing. And like all new technologies, it has had an effect--one that many institutions have been slow to embrace--and this is it: niching. The Internet makes it easier for us to explore the particular niche that strikes our fancy. What this suggests is that every endeavor needs to cater to the niches it can...