Who You Calling Mediasaurus? – The New York Times dodges Michael Crichton’s death sentence. Jack Schafer:

‘ “To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years,” novelist-filmmaker Michael Crichton wrote in a widely quoted Wired magazine piece, “Mediasaurus,” which he adapted from an April 1993 speech before the National Press Club. “Vanished, without a trace.”

…Replacing the established media within a decade, Crichton predicted, would be an Infotopia in which “artificial intelligence agents” would roam “the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page, or a nightly news show, that addresses my interests.”

…Where did Crichton go wrong? (Where did I go wrong?) Fables of the near future have a way of never materializing, whether they be fevered dreams of nuclear energy too cheap to meter or fossil fuels too expensive to burn. To be fair, Crichton wasn’t the only one to get puking drunk on the new media moonshine. Many of us spent a lost weekend—sometimes months—in a stupor after reading early issues of Wired. But instead of blotting out conventional media, the emerging Infotopia seems only to have made the conventional media more ubiquitous.’ Slate