I See The “Web is Dead”… Wait… What?

Am I the only one who had a John Connor type cybernetic doomsday panic attack at seeing this headline? According to the Wired article written by Chris Anderson:

“You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.”

But if the web is truly dead, just how are you reading this? Could it be that I am the only one shocked to not have seen more news articles, tweets, Facebook status updates, blog posts and the like about this war cry? Maybe I missed them because I wasn’t on the web that day. Then again we all know to never feed the trolls. What I found rather interesting about this article is pointed out by Gawkers Ryan Tate:

“Wired released its cover story package first to the Web, on Wired.com. You won’t find it in Wired’s iPad edition, and it’s not out in print yet. The death of the web might be the ‘inevitable course of capitalism,’ but it apparently pays better to deliver that news via a dying medium.”

The web may have been around for 20 years like Anderson noted, but how many of us have actually used the internet for 20 years? I personally did not have internet until 1996 when I started college. The reality is the web is still in its infancy in the grand scheme of things, and that’s coming from the real “inventor” of the web, not this guy….oh wait that’s the internet.

For most people, trying to figure out the difference between what is on the web and what is on the internet is an impossible task. For those of us who work in this medium, one thing is certain, a headline like “The Web is Dead” will grab attention, get people thinking and push the discussion further.

It’s also a fun read.  And it really is alive.  Right?