Of course the Web’s not dead. It may not even be dying – it all depends on how you crunch the numbers and what unit you choose to measure with. The headline is meant to draw readers in, and it has done its job well.

So what does the article, written by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, actually say? It’s really a pair of articles that focus on the rise of the app-centric Internet. Anderson says that twas users killed the Web, for they chose “getting” over “browsing.”

An entire generation has grown up in front of a browser. The exploration of a new world has turned into business as usual. We get the Web. It’s part of our life. And we just want to use the services that make our life better. Our appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity with the status quo grows.

How do you “get” things online? You choose applications that just work, like the programs you download from the iTunes Store for your iPad or the doodads you run on your smartphone or the Netflix functionality built in to your X-box. Every time a user buys or uses an app instead of a Web browser, it’s a vote for a more closed and centrally organized system, Anderson says.

Rather that seeing this as the death of creativity, as Jonathan Zittrain more or less does, Anderson sees this as a natural stage in the evolution of markets, industries and media. We would do well, he says, to remember that the Web does not represent the pinnacle of Internet-use evolution.

The Internet is the real revolution, as important as electricity; what we do with it is still evolving. As it moved from your desktop to your pocket, the nature of the Net changed. The delirious chaos of the open Web was an adolescent phase subsidized by industrial giants groping their way in a new world. Now they’re doing what industrialists do best — finding choke points. And by the looks of it, we’re loving it.

Wolff’s article takes a different approach, saying that it was businesses looking for ways to turn an online profit that led the way toward the app-focused Internet. Companies that grow huge online eventually reach a critical mass, he writes. After that, they become too big to beat. They become an empire. The sun never sets on them. Google did it. Amazon did too, for a while.

But no empire lasts forever. So rather than beating them at their game, which they’ve already mastered, the challengers find ways to innovate and to play a new game on a different ballfield. The new game is so innovative and so different that people flock to it — think of Facebook here. Soon, the new game becomes simply a way of life and an empire of its own, all without directly competing with the old empires.

The biggest moneymaking game in town now is providing quality content to consumers. The content producers will make money by charging people for access to that content on an app platform — and people will pay for it because it’s easy, it works and it looks good. The content producers will also make money off of advertisers, who will be more willing to pay more money for ads that reach a stable audience, rather than the brigades of drifters that comprise normal Web traffic.

Since the dawn of the commercial Web, technology has eclipsed content. The new business model is to try to let the content — the product, as it were — eclipse the technology.

No matter how you look at it, app use is on the rise. And while it’s not necessarily killing the Web, we would do well to remember that there’s an open and generative Internet waiting behind all those pretty and well-designed apps, an Internet just waiting for another BIG THING to bring the next generation of media moguls to their knees and painfully shatter their precious networks.

This all reminds me of something Clay Shirky wrote last year. He focused on the death of newspapers, but the idea fits:

Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

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This is, perhaps, the best illustration I have seen so far of what Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus is about — at least the best illustration in comic strip form.

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I also bought The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which I will read immediately after Shirky’s book. I imagine that I will be somewhat more angry after reading Carr, but that’s generally how I feel after reading something he’s written about the Internet. I expect it from him.

You can credit Nieman Journalism Lab with getting me to buy Carr’s book. On the lab blog, Matthew Battles is writing ongoing reviews of both books as he reads them (in five parts, as of this writing — 1 2 3 4 5) Battles has inspired me to do my own “reviews” — or at least thoughtful write-ups. I hope this will get me back into an academic frame of mind; since leaving grad school, that sort of deep analytic reading and writing has fallen by the wayside.

I should also mention that I bought both of these books not on paper but in iBooks. This will be my first serious experience in reading a book entirely in an electronic format. I’ll share some thoughts on that as I go along too. So far, so good.

(The above image is borrowed respectfully from the Nieman Journalism Lab.)

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Once we in media are finished with our work we allow the public to comment. We throw our product over the wall and let people react while we retreat into the castle and shut the gates so we cannot hear them. They know they are talking to bricks and so they shout and cover them with spray paint. Only we have the power to clean the mess but we’ve left the scene and so the castle walls are soon overrun with graffiti.

He goes on:

When instead we open up to conversation earlier in our process then the conversation can become more collaborative and productive: We ask people what they know, which is a mark of respect and value. We listen to advice and requests. We end our separation from the public and join it. Waiting until we are done to listen is too late.

The point he makes is that media people see the Internet as too much of a medium. But that view makes too many assumptions about control and ownership, assumptions that just don’t meld with reality.

Instead, Jarvis says, the Internet is more like a place. We need to have more social options, akin to being able to walk around an arrogant guy yelling profanities in the street. Facebook and Twitter provide models that might be worth looking at, though, since most people on those networks use their real names and network with real people, many of whom they know.

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Either way, it’s about time we got over ourselves as some institution of capital-J Journalism and responded to readers in the comments sections of our sites, engaged with them on Twitter and answered their questions on Facebook.

As Robert Quigley at Old Media New Tricks writes, “People seem to think we’re a giant, uncaring media corporation. They’re pleasantly surprised when they get a real human response.”

For the sake of argument though, what’s the justification for maintaining a wall of silence? Why should we not respond to reader questions and concerns? Anyone?

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This was among them:

My question is, why didn’t the reporter respond himself? If there’s a policy preventing him from doing so, why does the paper have that policy? Why aren’t reporters engaging with their readers online?

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Reader comments on Pantagraph.com often are informative, sparking serious dialogue on an issue of local or national interest. At other times, they are offensive and devoid of civility, the worst of which include personal attacks and/or assertions that have nothing to do with the story.

In recent weeks, we have seen too much of the latter on some local stories. Far too much. So, effective immediately and through the New Year’s holiday weekend, no comments will be allowed on new local content posted on Pantagraph.com.

This “cooling off” period is meant as a strong reminder to our online readers: that the reason comments are allowed in the first place is to foster a “spirit of community involvement and conversation.”

Comically, the paper added this postscript to its message some time later:

P.S. — Thank you for your comments on this decision. No more comments are being accepted on this matter as of 3:30 p.m. Dec. 31.

Makes me wonder what the comments were like on this particular article before they shut them off.

Anyway, this is not the way to improve the civility of your online community. Yes, these vitriolic, abusive commenters were violating the paper’s terms of service agreement or online behavior pact. And while you can legally hold these people accountable for behaving by the terms of that agreement, you can’t reasonably expect people to abide by the terms of an agreement they likely agreed to without reading it.

No, you can’t flash a page of legalese in front of a user and expect the community to moderate itself. A strong, respectful community needs moderators who care about the community. Most newspaper sites’ comments are fire-and-forget. That is, they are an feature tacked on because somebody thought that Web sites are supposed to have comments.

Rather than cutting off comments and punish those petulant children for their misbehavior, why not make the reporters at the paper take ownership of the comments on their articles. The reporters, who already have an investment in the story, can moderate the comments, participate in the discussion and help keep things civil without resorting to putting your readers in “time out.”

Update: Jason Fry at Reinventing the Newsroom suggests giving users more tools to police their own online communities. These are great ideas, provided that your newspaper has the ability to install modern commenting systems that have tools like the ones he mentions. (Mine doesn’t. Sadface.)

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