Yeats wrote his poem “The Second Coming” in 1919, just after World War I, around the start of the Irish War of Independence and the flu pandemic of 1918–1919. We have experienced nothing like World War I but it all, nevertheless, sounds a bit familiar. Little wonder that he writes “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
Pretty much everywhere in the Western world digital media are colonising the traditional income streams of the so-called “legacy press,” particularly the locals, either putting it financially out of business, or rendering it irrelevant as readers go online. And where the press itself manages to adapt to the online world, reader experience becomes disembodied and disengaged.
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