There was a rather large story in 2008 that drove readership up across the board.

The Times isn't irrelevant, but it has been losing the unique role it had as the one agenda-setting paper in the country.

Still, if newspapers were to fail, the Times would be the last one standing.

But why don't we blame the internet for anything? If it is so important, it must have screwed up a couple hundred thousand times.

Because the Internet is perfect in every way. It is just the prelude to hovercars and personal robot butlers.

No, we haven't reconciled ourselves with the idea that the web is "real." Nobody was willing to pay for "premium" accounts or, well, anything really, because it was just The Internet and not the real world. Now that the real world can't afford to keep propping up the Internet, we've got problems...

Here's what it is --

We can get a good range of world news online, so the product that the newspaper and magazine sellers were peddling is much less valuable to us.

If I want silly feel-good semi-intellectual articles, I've got my college's alumni mag. (Twenty-someodd issues a year.) Otherwise, I visit news sites and blogs, and I watch the occasional television programme. (I have a soft spot for Morning Joe in the States and Don Newman's Politics show on Newsworld in Canada. Liked Mike Duffy Live, too.)

When I was a teenager, on the other hand, I'd read three or four newspapers a day and at least two weekly magazines.

If/when a few global media empires collapse and online content drops in quality, then I may change my habits again.

I wonder if the online ads generate as much revenue as the ones in the paper copy.

What were you doing Saturday when I was thinking about just that very thing, Temu? On line ads are a bubble that is bursting.

I always wondered why the online advertisers were willing to pay so much for ads I learned early to tune out or block.

Guess they started to wonder, too...

People blame the Internet for all kinds of stuff all the time. Such as - the decline of journalism; the decline of the book industry; the decline of language, easy access to pornography; terrorism; facilitating the worldwide sale of stolen goods; eroding the civility of the kids these days. These are just the ones off the top of my head.

What I blame the Internet for is the erosion of our understanding between public and private (this is another common line of blame the Internet gets). This is a facet of our inability to reconcile ourselves with the idea that the web is real, as Renee so aptly put it.

There is plenty that the web gets blamed for. Further, there are certainly huge portions of the web that we could do without, and there is probably some aspect of the Internet that everyone finds annoying - however, I think there is just enough utility in it to make it impossible for people to turn away.

I don't think that is right. People blame the journalists for the decline of journalism. I think people blame Amazon for the book thing. TV and radio and Morse Code before it caused the decline of language. But none of any of that is the internet's fault, just the people misusing it or other media - that is what we tell ourselves. No one blames Tim Berners-Lee.
He's not in shackles. No one is ripping down the wires or bombing the rooms full of routers. When will they start?

What's that? Sorry. Was watching a movie on hulu.com.

I don't blame, I thank. I thank the Internet for easy access to pornography, and I thank the Internet for easy access to banned materials like the Anarchist's Cookbook (which, far from being a way to blow shit up, actually contains about a hundred different ways to way to blow yourself up... by accident, anyway.) The Internet lets everybody contribute, even the people who shouldn't be, and I think that's beautiful, especially the part where you can simply click away. With books you don't like, you have to, you know, give them to people. And we have stacks of Playboys in the basement that will never be read again. What a pain! The Internet is the place for the ephemeral, the old newspapers under the stairs and the naughty smut under the mattress and the religious pamphlets you have to dispose of and the stuff the government doesn't want you to see. It's like a giant attic. It saves us so much space!

Also, Facebook ads are a screaming deal, and quite effective.

I actually am starting to think that humans don't deal with cacophony that well.

So then the web, like guns, isn't to blame for anything - people choose to read the NYT online, the web doesn't force them to. People choose to download media they might have otherwise paid for, the web doesn't force them to, etc.

I still say the Internet takes plenty of blame for plenty of things - I make no argument that that blame is well founded. But your point is taken, there is not a riot of 21st century luddites ripping up the fiber-optic infrastructure - but then again, I think we make the luddites out to be more than they were sometimes.

There is some sort of shadowy Luddite PR thing going on that no one really has a handle on.