Colin McEnroe at the Hartford Courant tells us of a 55 yo woman who lost her well-paying job in print media and is now working for free at a web startup learning, for her, such esoteric concepts as SEO and how to write an URL.
This is a little bit like Henry Ford saying he hadn’t bothered to learn how to steer or brake, but only a little bit. The shift we’re talking about is more hierarchical, and I can’t even think of a good analogy, because the change is so big. Imagine that you were Christiaan Barnard and that a sudden wave of technological change made it possible for pretty much anybody to perform heart transplants. Five people on your street were — without prior medical training — suddenly doing heart surgery in their basements and in some cases solving problems you never got your arms around. You might still reasonably conclude you were better than they were, but wouldn’t you want to know how this was possible? It’s that level of anti-curiosity, and it was/is all over the profession
That, and blissful delusion that the whole web thingee is just a passing fad or something.
McEnroe, BTW, posted this on his blog. He’s a journalist who made the transition to the web long ago. Whether the Courant itself survives, is another story, as it’s owned by Sam “Let’s destroy a newspaper chain” Zell.