By Laurent Beccaria and Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, from an essay included as an insert in the Winter 2013 issue of the French quarterly XXI. Beccaria is the publisher of the journal; Saint-Exupéry is editor in chief. Translated from the French by John Cullen.

Since 1980, our consumption of information has grown by more than 350 percent. One might have thought this would be a boon to the media, which is after all in the information business. Yet print media were thoroughly undone by the digitization of the economy. The costly, ponderous industrial process of printing faced competition from another…