Science & Tech Quote by Will McDonough

A prediction like this works less as a tech forecast than as a cultural power grab: it declares the center of gravity has moved, and anyone still clinging to ink is negotiating from a losing position. McDonough’s phrasing is blunt, almost impatient. “The future is electronic” isn’t an argument; it’s a verdict. Then he stacks the evidence in a neat relay race of media forms - radio to television to the Internet - implying inevitability, momentum, progress. Newspapers aren’t merely challenged; they’re treated as already past tense.

The subtext is about speed and control. Electronic media wins by compressing time: it updates instantly, travels frictionlessly, and collapses distance between event and audience. Print, by contrast, is burdened by production cycles, physical distribution, and a kind of gatekeeping that suddenly looks slow rather than reassuring. When McDonough says “not really newspapers anymore,” the hedge (“really”) does interesting work: it concedes that papers may persist as objects, but argues they’ll stop mattering as the default civic interface.

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th-century mood where “the Internet” was both promise and threat - a new commons and a new marketplace. It also anticipates the unglamorous reality that would follow: news becomes less a daily package and more a continuous stream, monetized by attention, optimized for reach, and increasingly shaped by the platforms carrying it. McDonough isn’t mourning a lost institution; he’s naming a regime change, with all the democratic and economic turbulence that implies.