Media pundits keep saying “books are dead,” but I just had my highest month of book royalties ever.
Tech geeks keep blogging that “RSS is dead,” but this past month I got a record number of visitors who were RSS subscribers, across four different blogs where I see the stats.
Social media gurus say that “E-mail newsletters are dead,” even though the click-through rate for e-mail newsletters is about 100 times the response rate for a tweet or a Facebook status update.
Grizzled travelers will tell you “That place is totally spoiled now” when talking about the formerly unknown spot they visited back in the day, 15 years ago when booking a hotel meant you slept on a bamboo cot while rats scurried underneath. When the “shower” was a bucket of cold water and a ladle.
When you hear these bold proclamations, remember that they are coming from the pioneers, the bleeding edge types that always want to be the first, the boldest, the coolest.
But Grandma still has no idea what an RSS reader is. Your uncle just now figured out how to reduce the size of a photo before e-mailing it. You still have to debunk your aunt’s paranoid e-mail forwards with Snopes.com links. Your brother just last week learned that Costa Rica is not in Africa.
Things don’t move nearly as fast as those in front think they do.
Ignore the chatter. Do what works for you. Enjoy life. “Fun” is not dead, and it’s up to you to define it.
