I am currently in the midst of reading the Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The author describes a Black Swan as a high-impact, hard-to-predict, rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations.

In the book, Taleb states he is often asked by members of the media to predict the next 10 Black Swans. While the question itself proves they missed the point of the book entirely, I do believe that at least one Black Swan is foreseeable.

A new mass media to supplant the Internet will come into mainstream use before the end of this century.

To examine my prediction, let’s look at our history of mass media.

Through the 17th century:

You could hardly call it “mass” media, but word of mouth, public oration, and publicly posted government bulletins were how most information was disseminated.

17th Century:

The advent of the printing press allowed newspapers and magazines to become the first real one to many form of communication, or mass media. Both included the previous form, and used advertising as well as direct sales to support their efforts.

Most countries had at least one major newspaper in print by the end of the 17th century and by the early to mid 18th century, newspapers had become mainstream.

Early 20th Century:

The earliest broadcast radio stations began in the first decade of the 20th Century and by the late 1930s to early 1940s, radio became the next big wave of mass media. It included content previously delivered by newspapers by reading the major news stories over the air.

Radio was broadcast free over the air (it would not be until the early 21st Century that pay-to-listen radio stations were launched on a mass scale), and the media was supported by either advertising or listener donations.

Mid 20th Century:

Television followed closely on radio’s heels and by the end of the 1950s, most homes in America included a television set. Like all previous forms of mass media, television absorbed the content previously provided by the other forms of mass media, with news broadcasts featuring prominently and many radio stars adapting their hit shows for television.

Television was broadcast free over the air and was supported by advertising. The early 1980s saw the first pay-to-view 24 hour channels emerge.

Late 20th Century:

Though the inception of the Internet happened in the 1960s, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Internet became the next mainstream mass media. Like every other new mass media before it, the Internet included every form of mass media that came before it.

Internet content providers were supported by all of the old models of advertising and pay-to-view web content, but do to the low cost of information dissemination online, an individual was (and is) able to self-support their medium.

What’s Next:

One thing every new mass media had in common, was the complete lack of predictability. It is doubtful that an average person living in 1550 could have foreseen the advent of daily newspapers. An average American in the 1850s would have had a difficult time imagining the radio and his post-Civil War brethren would have found the concept of television to be a form of madness. You could not have explained the Internet to someone returning from World War II if you were given a week to do so.

Taleb’s Black Swan is, by it’s very nature, unforeseeable. To be clear, I am not attempting to forecast *what* that new mass media will be. It is as inconceivable to me now as watching the moon landing would have been to a turn-of-the-century blacksmith. My only prediction — as inconceivable as it may seem to those of us with a 2010 viewpoint — is that a new mass media that will supplant the Internet is coming, and probably sooner rather than later. It will likely include the Internet and every other form of mass media that preceded it.

If I’m wrong, this blog post on the Internet will outlive me so that future generations might see the ramblings of a long ago fool and his thoughts on swans.