It’s not survival of the fittest.

“Instead, convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.” — Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture

This is good stuff.

The dot-com bubble, as he later discusses, was water flowing against blockage. That way simply didn’t flow. So water does what it always does — it finds a path without resistance. It wasn’t the death of digital media, it was a way that didn’t work. It was companies trying to use the methods of traditional media to make a living the only way they knew how up to that point. They hit the rock. Consumers kept going around the rock and moved on to blogging and Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. Companies adapted by embracing influencers and new methods of supplying content that now people seemed okay paying to receive. The subscription service became ubiquitous (for better or worse). The dot-com-blockage was simply an old route that didn’t work anymore. But new routes work better for those who adapt.

How many times have we read the phrase “survival of the fittest?” It’s not true. That’s not how evolution works. I read an article stating that it’s not even an accurate quote. The author of that article claims Darwin never said as much but rather implicated that the creatures who adapted remained. Because the adaptable were the majority of the gene pool, the next generation inherited those characteristics. A handful of creatures didn’t adapt because they weren’t required to do so. Sharks. Alligators. They could stay largely the same. But that’s a small percentage of the whole population of creatures.

Adaptation is key and it’s happening all around us. Just this week, a stream of articles underscored what Microsoft has slowly admitted to for a while now … that Internet Explorer is a dead (or at least dying) software. Reporters dug up release notes about how Microsoft wasn’t supporting the platform any longer. They weren’t even updating it or planning to do so in the future. It’s still around because there is a generation of people who haven’t adapted to new browsers such as Chrome or Microsoft’s struggling Edge. The newer browsers embrace HTML5 more completely and run faster because they’ve left legacy code (and security holes) behind. But still, many people aren’t adapting. However, because the main browsers in the “gene pool” are the ones who run on more updated code, most applications have abandoned IE altogether. Consequently, those who haven’t adapted to new browsers are being left out. They’re complaining … like reptiles in the La Brea Tar Pits.

It’s good news and bad news but it’s really old news we’ve read again and again. Talk about the good old days is a myth. There are no easier times, just different times. We are beings in constant search of simple answers to complex questions and, as tough as that may sound to achieve, every invention we create achieves exactly that.

But there is an interesting thing humans do … we counter. We rebel. And we make that countering and rebellious nature into a magnetic culture. We smoke cigarettes despite the warnings (especially in Europe). We buy dumb phones (although this isn’t totally a cultural icon … yet). Check out clips and photos from the Grammy’s and count the types of watches. Most of them were mechanical (mechanical watch sales are up) and, the ones that weren’t mechanical were the old-school Casio single-function watches. (I didn’t spot a single Apple Watch.) I wonder if Casio ever expected to see a resurgence in sales for such a simple timepiece that was all the rage when digital watches first became available decades ago? I wonder, too, how much counter-culture will impact the evolution of new culture?

If past is prologue, I’m guessing there’s a way to theorize what might happen. I’m just excited to watch (pardon the pun).