I could have not chosen a more ironic
venue or a more ironic device to pen a
think piece about the impact mobile
devices will have on media consumption
and creation.

The Book Revue is one of the last inde-
pendent bookstores on Long Island, a
sprawling New York City suburb. However,
it remains a popular hangout for local
book lovers, families and singles. The
store even attracts a who’s who from the
literary world for big book signings.

That said, I know that my writing days
here are numbered. You see, the Book
Revue, just like countless of video rentals
stores, arcades and newspaper printing
presses, will one day fall victim to Media
Reforestation.

In less than ve years, all tangible media
— everything you can see, touch, taste and
smell — will be in sharp decline or extinct.
This includes printed books, magazines
and newspapers but also DVDs and disc-

based video games. With connectivity
slowly becoming ubiquitous and devices
like the iPad, smartphones, the Kindle and
netbooks becoming popular and relatively
affordable, it’s far less likely that we’ll
be consuming media in anything but a
downloadable form. Every day a newsprint
reader dies and she isn’t replaced.

Media reforestation has been well chron-
icled. All of these devices are a runaway
hits. And all one needs to do is look at the
sorry state of newspaper industry nan-
cials to see that digital pennies are not, in
the words of former NBC exec Jeff Zucker,
ever going to replace analog dollars any-
time soon. But the changes to come will be
even more destructive. That’s because they
will involve algorithms.

Last decade the big story was how
technology enabled all of us to become
publishers. However, the reality is quality
content remains work. Many people don’t
have the time or the motivation to consis-
tently churn it out.

to get there. People like Gary Vanyerchuck,
Chris Brogan and Jeff Jarvis, just to name
three, attained and scaled their inuence
thanks to a mix of talent and elbow grease.

But that was the rst chapter of media
reforestation. Chapter two is about to
begin and tablets and smartphones will
take center stage, enabling us to all sub-
consciously publish, and media to form
like magic out of algorithms.

Content creation today still requires
intent — thought then action. However
soon we will be able to put our gadgets on
autopilot and have them automatically
contribute to the process even when they
are safely tucked away in our pockets,
pocketbooks and backpacks. When these
millions of gadgets become powerful,
always-on servers it will revolutionize
media.

FourSquare is the beginning. Although
the emerging location-based service “only”
has one million users, it is able to spot
trends in data and surface news. When I
checked in during the 140 Character Con-
ference earlier this month, Foursquare was
able to detect a swarm of check-ins from
this one location and determine that news
was breaking here — and it awarded me a
special badge.

Now imagine that our gadgets collect
and publish automatically and on a mass
scale. FourSquare could turn that data into
a news service on the y. It’s services like

It’s a quiet April
Saturday afternoon in
Long Island, NY and
I am holed up on the
second oor of the
Book Revue, writing
this essay on my iPad.

In less than fve years, all tangible media — everything you can see, touch, taste and smell — will be in sharp decline or extinct.