“What is happening to the newspaper … can be thought of as a kind of Hegelian self-negation. What the newspaper is turning into is something that is, in its essentials, the opposite of what it set out to be….
“The whole notion of citizenship in this century has been predicated upon the assumption that a certain modicum of contemporary knowledge is universally distributed. The newspaper carries with it the aura of a kind of citizenship committed to duties as well as rights.
“A society that simply did not contain a medium approximating the universality of the newspaper would be a society composed of consumers, not citizens.” — Anthony David Smith, “Goodbye Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution of the 1980s” (1980)
Roland Klose 