I first realized that the Internet I knew was dying when Yahoo! changed the design of its front page.

See, in the days yore – which, in Internet time, was six months ago - Yahoo! was my home page. And I wanted Yahoo! to show up a lot because Yahoo! had the headlines. They were simple text headlines, seated in a hard-to-miss box in the upper right-hand corner. At a glance, I could get an idea of what the big news of the day was – what President Bush had said, which Senator had said some batshit thing that he’d apologize for a day later, a recent science discovery. I actually searched the net with Google, but Google is as impersonal as the Yellow Pages; Yahoo! was the place I called home.

Yahoo!’s headlines weren’t as comprehensive as, say, the BBC news site, but that actually served to make it more relevant. The fact that Yahoo! only had five headlines to work with forced them to pick and choose what was important, condensing a torrent of information into a kind of extended news haiku. It gave me a rough snapshot of the day’s important issues every time I opened a browser window, and I liked it that way.

Then the redesign came. And the headlines shifted.

Oh, they were still there – they were just stuffed into the most unappetizing section of the page, hovering precariously just above the fold near the middle of the page, smack in the spot where my eyes were least likely to be drawn to.

The big eye-candy now, the place anchored by a big picture and four little sub-pictures, is called “Featured.” It changes rapidly throughout the day – but unlike Yahoo’s headlines, it rarely features any actual news. Instead, it’s the sort of low-nutrition stream of quasi-news that occupies the time on Good Morning, America. Right now, as I look at it, “Featured” promises a video of zero-gravity acrobatics, talks about how Ellen Degeneres is going to host the Oscars, and mentions how more Americans are buying scooters!

Meanwhile, “Kabul bombing kills 10” is relegated to the ghetto of “In The News” at the bottom.

Worse, when the “Featured” zone does deign to show news, it’s a video. Yes, you can click on a link to watch a modified TV news spot that contains about a third of the content that even a short news article contains! Sometimes, you can’t even get the text link, just the video.

That’s when I realized the Internet as I knew it was dying.

See, I was attracted to the BBSes and CompuServe back in the old days because I am, at heart, a text whore. I like reading books. I like writing things. And I prefer to both get and receive my information through words, where you can craft an elegant message and get a lot of information in a few short paragraphs.

Books contain more. Oh, it may take a while to get through a book on American history, but any half-decent book on history will contain more facts than almost any television program you can name. TV shows (and books on tape) are restrained by the need to talk at a rate that people can hear – but a fast reader can process textual information much quicker than anyone can talk coherently. Worse, unlike a book, you can’t skim past the boring parts in a video presentation, where everything is presented at the same rate.

Furthermore, a book is designed to be consumed as a unit, so it can create a long argument that loops back upon itself and reinforces old points, whereas TV and video are usually designed to be consumed in fresh hour-long chunks.

Compare TV news to a newspaper. All the in-depth reporting takes place in the magazines; the TV news is so abbreviated that it barely manages to touch upon the headlines in the brief span it has. And that’s because video’s an interesting medium, but its informational density is very light.

Words, on the other hand… Words have everything.

The net is currently dominated by words. The rise of the blogosphere is essentially a triumph of writing, because it means that casual sluggers like me with a keyboard can analyze whatever just happened.

The blogs are people with words using a lot of words to dissect the events of the day. Some of those words are inaccurate, of course, but now there’s more depth to go into. Want to know about the Blood for Oil program? There’s a huge screed here on a right-wing site about everyone who was involved with it, and a lefty response over here picking apart its facts, and a gigantic counter-response talking about the shame of it all….

That’s debate. The two sides often don’t read each other, of course – blogs have polarized more than they’ve brought together – but that debate and analysis is only possible through words. A television show going into the same detail would take hours.

But it’s not like people didn’t know about words.

Books have been around for a long time, but TV clobbered it. We’re caught up in all of this fine writing because the sorts of people who’ve been attracted to the Internet until now either wanted to read or wanted to masturbate…. But unfortunately the vast majority of the public does not prefer to get its information via reading.

But that’s all we’ve been able to give you at 56.6k speed.

Now that we have the bandwidth to play with, I think we’re going to find precisely how much of the Internet has been created by the fact that text was all we had.

Yahoo!’s latest attempt to show zero-G videos is the tip of the wave – because I’m willing to bet that Yahoo! did some user surveys and found that people didn’t give a crap about bland old text headlines. They wanted something visual, something that moved, something exciting!

Quick, show them kids recalling 9/11! That has nothing to do with any of the important sociopolitical events that have occurred since then, but… Kids are cute!

The complex array of political factors feeding into the current state of affairs in Iraq? God, how are you going to get a soundbite out of that?

The rise of YouTube and company indicates to me that most people prefer videos over text, and I think you’re going to see a real sea change in the way the major Web sites work soon. It’s not that the written word will disappear from the Internet, but it will fade from dominance. Reading’s hard, and slow for most people, but anyone can look at a video. Up until now, the net has been the New York Times – dense and informative – but as the more mainstream audience is assimilated I think we’re going to see a much more mainstream twist to the way we get our news.

The big sites will become a kind of TV Information on demand, with the emphasis on the stuff that looks good on TV – explosions, crying people, and tech gadgets. The other sites – the ones that are currently big now – will be relegated to an Internet cultural backwater, much like The News Hour With Jim Lehrer is right now.

In other words, the things that blogs have been good at – in-depth examinations of pinpoint topics - will make them not nearly as interesting to folks as Katie Couric exploring her own colon with a microcamera, or some funny dude gluing rubber balls to his face. There's a big difference between providing an entertaining experience on camera versus in print; authors are rarely fun interviews, and actors are rarely good writers. In other words, we may well be looking at the high point of blogs (and Internet writing as we know it) right now.

The internet will not die – but I suspect it’s going to look a lot prettier in a decade or so, and a lot more superficial. And if you think it’s currently superficial… Just wait.

(Tell me I'm full of it)