At the end of 2009 a publication that has an important significance in my own life will fold. Guardian Technology (previously Online, etc) will be published in print form for the final time on December 14th.

The section has been important to my career because I found two jobs through the paper, although tellingly, the second of which was way back in 1996. It's the demise of technology job advertising in the printed media that has brought the end to a tech-sector dedicated section in the paper... Ironically because of the almost wholesale shift of IT jobs to the online market. These days I'm an avid reader of the section, but via RSS, so the content doesn't even drive me to purchase the printed paper (a treat I generally keep for Saturdays).

Quite how the section has been able to limp along without much in the way of advertising in recent years is almost certainly down to the non-profit funding body the Scott Trust. Sadly, times are apparently hard across the whole of the Guardian Media Group, so Technology bites the dust.

At 6.01pm on Wednesday November 4th I became a father. After a rather long labour, and an emergency c-section, Oscar James entered the world.

We are pulling together a few artefacts that, later in life, Oscar will be able to look at to gain an insight into the world into which he was born in 2009. So far, the list consists of copies of The Guardian and The Times newspapers (with half-completed sudoku in each from where I was sitting nervously in the delivery suite). I'm also probably going to get hold of the number one CD from the day he was born, although as that was by Cheryl Cole, I'm struggling to get the motivation to do so, and maybe the number one paperback from the week as well (Born Bad by Josephine Cox, which looks dreadful).

Suggestions for other timely artefacts are welcomed, but I wonder to what extent any of the above will still be recognisable objects to Oscar in, at a guess, eighteen years time?

If I think back to my own year of birth (1970), the primary form of distribution of music was vinyl. By my own 18th birthday, CD had become much more commonplace, with vinyl still in dominance (just) along with compact cassette. Today, in the age of Spotify, the very idea of "owning" music is becoming questioned - but the distribution medium is increasingly the bits and bytes of the Internet.

Newspapers have changed less in my lifetime in terms of the physical form - a newspaper from 2009 would be instantly recognisable to someone in 1970 - but the production process has changed beyond recognition. The end-to-almost-end digital process (the analogue bit being the printing onto paper and physical distribution) has meant it has been relatively straightforward for the "press" on "Fleet Street" to move all of their content on line. Unfortunately their business models haven't kept pace, and newspaper groups can be seen flailing around trying to understand how they can keep their businesses going into the future.

Whether Oscar will ever regularly read a newspaper or not will be interesting to see For the record, I get The Guardian of a Saturday, and the Observer on a Sunday, occasionally buying weekday papers, and now often picking up the free Metro and Evening Standard, but I read most news from RSS feeds (mostly from newspapers) on my phone.

Books are another interesting case - devices like the Kindle have garnered a lot of press, but whether we will see the iPod-isation of reading in the next eighteen years we wait to see. Reference material is now the domain of the Web (thank you, Wikipedia!), but there is still something very visceral about a book that e-Paper and a microprocessor will struggle to reproduce. There again, many said the same for the vinyl record...

Overall, if you look at the history of media platforms, they tend to have adapted themselves on the emergence of new forms. The cinema didn't die when TV came along, but Newsreel became a casualty.

The interesting thing for Oscar is that we now have a single distribution platform that can take any form of content (ie, the Internet). The possibilities are boundless. But, unfortunately, Cheryl Cole is still at number one. Will she be about in 2017, I wonder?