Things to come?

If we can increasingly do work and make money on the internet, what is going to happen to all those industries (like financial institutions, media industries) that have up till now been centered in cities but are actually less reliant on close physical proximity of individuals than industries like manufacture and agriculture etc? As huge office buildings start to become obsolete, and the home increasingly regains importance as a hub for work, leisure and social life, will this herald a new age where cities no longer retain their importance as attractors for economic and social activity?

I believe that the rise of the internet has the ability to impact the urban structure and architecture in many ways, most importantly in terms of dissolving the city into decentralized towns based on primary and secondary industries, moving away from our environmentally harmful sprawls of skyscrapers and dense infrastructure. The office skyscraper is, to me, fast becoming a harmful redundancy, because not only is it detrimental to nature due to its urban footprint, it forces people to commute from their homes, often in automobiles, which continue to use up valuable resources and produce tons of toxic outputs. The skyscraper itself is highly energy dependent, what with its great demands on HVAC and lighting systems. If one day the tools for digital video conferencing and online transactions become so commonplace that it removes the need for people to congregate physically at a location for tertiary work, then it would eliminate the need for a significant contributor to environmental degradation. And I believe that the day isn't that far away.

NEW YORK - The Internet is causing something of an earthquake in the US media industry, which last year reported a nearly twofold increase in job cuts as more people turn to the Web as their main source for news.

Challenger, Gray and Christmas, a New York-based global outplacement firm that tracks job cuts, said 17,809 media jobs were eliminated in 2006, an 88 per cent increase over 2005, when 9,453 job cuts were announced.

The downsizing is expected to continue, the company said, pointing to more than 2,000 job cuts announced by media companies in the first half of January.

'These (media) organisations will continue to make adjustments as their focus shifts from print to electronic,' said Mr John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

'Until they can figure out a way to make as much money from their online services as they are losing from the print side, it is going to be an uphill battle,' he added.

Mr Challenger said news organisations today have no choice but to build a strong online presence or risk 'fading into oblivion', and they must compete with an exploding number of bloggers, industry sites and others vying for people's attention.

According to a recent study by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre, 50 million Americans turn to the Internet every day to seek out news. Only 17 per cent say they get their news from a national paper.

Another Pew survey found that the number of Americans who go online for housing information has doubled since 2000.

'Everything that you used to rely on newspapers for can be found on the Internet,' Mr Challenger said. 'The decline in newspaper and newsweekly subscriptions will continue as more and more people purchase computers and gain access to the Internet.' -- AFP