Monday, October 4, 2010

Is The Word "Publish" Becoming Obsolete?

NYTimes.com: "You could say that everyone is a publisher these days, with blogging, Twitter and Facebook (amongst hundreds of other social media tools). What's more, there are many new devices on which to deliver content - tablets, smart phones, video web sites and more. ... Ultimately it's a much larger and diverse media ecosystem than it was even a couple of years ago, so the increasing irrelevance of the word 'publish' probably doesn't matter much. Perhaps the next update to Oxford Dictionary's definition of 'publish' will be along these lines: used to mean make something public using print, but now virtually everything is public online. Word discontinued." Of course, rumor has it that the next edition of the OED won't even be "published" on paper.