The photo at top is from 2005, which might as well be a million years ago. Commuters on the NYC subway were that recently digesting every kind of printed matter, with newspapers especially prominent. We will never witness that scene again, as we’ve transitioned into the age of smartphones, a medium that has disappeared the broadsheet and tabloid and paperback. These tools are wonderfully portable and can hold far more information, though some things have been lost in the changeover. That’s not to say America was wonderful in 2005 and isn’t now–both times were rather grim–but not much good can come of making words shrink, eliminating them, even.

To paraphrase Norma Desmond: News *is* big. It’s the *gadgets* that got small. Reading on smartphones isn’t easy, so skimming headlines about current events is about the best anyone can do now. It’s not just the size of the characters that’s daunting but also the speed with which they travel, as they ping, prompt and interrupt us nonstop. News is always breaking until it feels broken.

Nicholas Carr, one of our time’s preeminent critics (cultural, social and media), has penned a really wonderful Nieman Reports piece on the “nowness” of the news, the concept of fast and first run amok. As he writes, “for 500 years the medium of print has been training us to pay attention.” Not any longer. The opening:

“Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other—sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth.”

Those opening words would seem to describe, with the zeal typical of the modern techno-utopian, the arrival of our new online media environment with its feeds, streams, texts and tweets. What is the Web if not sudden, instantaneous and burning with fervor? But French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine wrote these words in 1831 to describe the emergence of the daily newspaper. Journalism, he proclaimed, would soon become “the whole of human thought.” Books, incapable of competing with the immediacy of morning and evening papers, were doomed: “Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book—the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a newspaper.”

Lamartine’s prediction of the imminent demise of books didn’t pan out. Newspapers did not take their place. But he was a prophet nonetheless. The story of media, particularly the news media, has for the last two centuries been a story of the pursuit of ever greater immediacy. From broadsheet to telegram, radio broadcast to TV bulletin, blog to Twitter, we’ve relentlessly ratcheted up the velocity of information flow.

To Shakespeare, ripeness was all. Today, ripeness doesn’t seem to count for much. Nowness is all.•