A Seneca Cliff for the Web as we know it?
We can’t ignore the evidence any longer. The “Web”, intended as a constellation of independent information providers is dying. It is going through a Seneca Cliff of its own, being replaced by a “Trinet”, controlled by the three giant companies, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
I have been noticing it with the stats for “Cassandra’s Legacy”. You can see how the decline in the number of contacts has been steady over the past year. Here are the stats:
We don’t yet see a Seneca Cliff, that is a rapid drop in the audience (don’t look at the drop at the end of the graph; it is just because the data are for the current month). I think it is mainly because I have been trying to contrast the decline by publishing more posts, but that has not been sufficient to change the trend. Here are the data for another blog of mine, “Chimeras”
In this case, the blog used to be visited by students looking for text to cut and paste for their term papers on mythology. They are not coming anymore; evidently, they found other sources of information. Or maybe the search engines don’t lead them to my blog anymore. Hard to say, but it is a fact.
So, what’s happening? As always, things change and, in our times, tend to change fast. Many of us can remember the “age of mass media,” now obsolete as steam engines and mechanical calculators. It looks incredible that there existed a time when everyone was exposed to the same information, provided under strict control by the government. In the Soviet Union, it was under control of the Communist Party.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
