Every day the world becomes more technology and media-savvy. Each successive generation has a clearer understanding of how we receive our news, information and entertainment. The "fourth wall" that we used to imagine between the audience and the media provider has now been so thoroughly circumvented, scaled, breached and otherwise penetrated that it hardly seems to exist anymore. Reality TV certainly shows us that, especially when reality TV "stars" become famous for doing mundane things they would normally have done without a TV camera pointed at them, then after their run ends on The Real World or The Real Housewives of Orange County, continue to get paid to do it by someone else, solely because they're famous now.
This is all just a roundabout way of saying that I'm writing this post on the afternoon of Friday, Dec. 21st, hours before SAS closes officially for the holidays until Jan. 2, but I'm not going to post it for a few days, so that this blog will have a little life to it while we're all away unwrapping presents and dashing through the snow in one-horse open sleighs. In this increasingly media-savvy world it seems especially disingenuous to pretend I'm doing otherwise, since I'm sure once I figure out how to do it, I could cause this post to appear at midnight on Christmas Eve, when I will be asleep at my in-laws, with visions of sugarplums, etc.
So, Happy Holidays, people of the future!
Regular readers will be happy to hear that our esteemed Editor-on-Leave Alison has a beautiful, healthy new baby girl. Both mother and baby are resting comfortably, as they say. I'll let Alison tell you more about her sometime.
Speaking of new additions, we welcome a new voice to the blog this week. Sean Gargan is director of publishing at SAS, a position he's held for a decade. His total tenure at SAS spans 22 years, most of it in our publishing group. Has he seen some big changes? You betcha.
"Digitization is changing all the rules," Sean says. "The traditional distribution system has been stood on its ear. We've relegated control of how the information is accessed to the end user. It's our job as publishers to make sure we're in all the places where our customers will look for information, instead of just boxing up the books and putting them on a conveyor belt."
Heady 21st century stuff, but what did you expect him to say? "I miss the old days"?
Check out a bit more of Sean's man-of-the-future perspective in his upcoming post about new developments at Google, due to be published soon - maybe at midnight on Dec. 31.
