Over at Jeff Jarvis’ blog BuzzMachine, he put up a great post today on how the emergent technology of Apple’s iPod and the iPhone are changing everything for music, television and newspapers.

Jarvis writes:

In these pages, internet parent Vint Cerf wondered when television would reach its iPod moment - that is, the time when we download video more than we sit watching broadcasts. Then TV will face the upheaval music has barely survived. Also here, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has speculated about newspapers’ iPod moment, which he foresees arriving with the emergence of “a relatively mass-market device on which reading a newspaper (and watching it and listening to it) will seem quite normal”. Or as Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams blogged: “When you have a web browser in your pocket, a printed newspaper is redundant.”

Jarvis stresses the same thing I have been speaking of here. The important and often overlooked issue of why the iPhone isn’t just an over-hyped cellphone but rather a true and profound revolution that has only just begun to reverberate through culture, politics and the economy is simply this:

It’s not a phone. It’s a computer.

These new devices represent the next generation of the computer: small, sleek, powerful, portable. Everything that the computer, the web, and the browser have done to content - enabling it to become infinite but personal; instantaneous yet permanent; unrestricted by medium because it offers all media; and enriched by the conversation around it - is now in the palm of your hand. Everything you can do on the web you can do with media on the iPhone, anywhere, any time.

Bingo.

Jarvis’ focus is on the newspaper industry and the changes that are being embraced and (more often than not) rejected by an aging information media. His insights on the impact of the iPod and iPhone touch deeper than just the newspapers though and he knows this. Go give his whole post a read.

I, for one, can’t wait to see how this first of many ultra-portable personal networked computers will shift our entire world.

Exciting times.

Cheers.