That’s great poem says I

a nod from me and a blink of the eye

nae bother, says the Chinky,

yer a nobody, step aside I’ve bigger fish ta fry!

Wiv me fried Mars bar,

and carry out from the broo,

I’ll be a making hay while it shines,

instead of looking at that ugly gob that’s you!

So get ye away to your bed this night,

afore I crack my knuckles under this street light,

and whisk yer soul into Hades,

and create quite a hullabaloo!

And you’re right about the fact that community based readers are taking the place of the traditional newspaper buyers. Indeed, the entire nature of reading is changing just as the way how we process what we read and the ways we react to it are, too.

If you’ve read Dan Gardner’s fabulous book ‘Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear’ you learn a lot about our very modern psychology of the world that is fast changing around us.

The main point of Gardner’s book is that there is a huge chasm between our perception of risk and the actual reality of it, and more often than not that gap gets ever bigger and bigger as we use the Internet and other forms of technology.

“The problem is we have a brain that evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment, which is completely unlike the world in which we live. You turn on the news, you see a parade of fantastically improbable events that are tragic and awful. A child is snatched on the other side of the planet. Now, you have a rational mind which states this event says nothing about the safety of your own children. But you also have an unconscious mind and that does not process information in the same way.”

So what you get is a skewed version of reality that only gets worse the more you multiply the technology and media you are using.

I predict a radical change in all forms of communication as the internet has both brought us together but also rendered us asunder through it’s immediacy and mediating functions.