I still get a newspaper. I read books and magazines. I listen to the radio. So, probably, do you.

But all these technologies (and industries) have been "killed" several times by great new technologies. They are all supposed to be dead, thanks to various features of the Web, right now.

Today Dennis Dunleavy offers a great discussion of all this.

Fact is journalists have a bad habit of buying industry hype about "killing" older systems, and in doing that they're buying what George Lakoff would call a "political frame."

Words have power, and by saying that old technologies are about to be "killed" by new ones, we tend to give the sponsors of the new the power to do just that. By doing this before the market has a chance to decide where the new one will fit into its lifestyle, we do everyone a disservice.

Billions of dollars have been lost over the years, and millions of jobs have disappeared prematurely, because companies, and markets, bought into these false frames.

Marketers, in fact, make their money mainly by creating such frames. Most are quite harmless. Branding is basically a verbal-and-visual frame that, in the case of a Big Time Brand, will convey the real consumer benefits of a company to the prospective buyer, and give them a warm feeling about the company offering the product or service.

In this case, it's not so harmless. We have made new laws and restricted consumer choice in copyright because it was assumed "CDs" would soon disappear, and that digital files were or are permanent. We have shipped jobs overseas prematurely, assuming (thanks to rhetoric) that the products or services represented by those jobs had matured. The phrase "intellectual property" is a framing device -- copyright is not land but the phrase turns it into something permanent.

Similarly we have allowed the false frames of rhetoric to convince us that we need to give power to many industries that are in fact dying a natural death, like broadcasting and the telephone business.

It is time we recognize the relationship among marketing, politics, and language.

Time for the corporate world to make George Lakoff a rich man.