In last week’s monthly economic webinar, Dr. Joe brought up the idea of the “Third Wave,” the next big communications disruption that will adversely impact the demand for print. First of all, what were the first two waves?

First Wave: ~1998, when the consumer Internet took hold. Sure, the Internet had been bubbling up since the late 1980s, mostly amongst government and academic institutions. On August 6, 1991, the World Wide Web went live, and almost exactly four years later (August 9, 1995), Netscape had its groundbreaking IPO that kicked off what would become known as the “dot-com boom.” It was in 1998 that the Internet officially became a force to be reckoned with, and everyone came to the realization that the Internet was far more than what Dave Barry described as “CB radio, but with more typing.” It was also the last really good year—the end of the “good old days”—for the mainstream U.S. printing industry,

Second Wave: ~2008, when social media and mobile communications begin to explode. Facebook had been launched in 2004 (initially as a Harvard University-only networking site), and would supplant MySpace which appeared abruptly in 2003 and disappeared just as abruptly only a few years later. YouTube was launched in 2005, and Twitter was launched a year later in 2006. These were all well and good, but in 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, and in 2008, Apple launched the App Store, which marked the point at which mobile was going to be a thing. 2008 was also the year in which broadband penetration exceeded 50% of U.S. homes. It was also in this time period that annual printing shipments dropped below $100 billion, accounting for less than 1% of GDP.