Everyone knows that technological change sometimes displaces whole art forms. It is a commonplace of art history that the invention of photography totally reshaped the purpose of painting, because oils and pigments were suddenly no longer the most efficient way to accurately represent a visual scene. Painters thus went off to explore more subjective and emotional impressions that were not so grounded in the mere literal transcription of reality—hence movements like expressionism, impressionism, Symbolism, cubism, surrealism, etc.
In his introductory essay in his collection of prose pieces, Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), B.S. Johnson points out that something similar happened to the novel after the development of film. He notes that Joyce was well aware of the potential of the cinema to be a more efficient medium for telling stories. And so, the novel had to figure out what it could do better than film—if its 19th century task of merely telling "what happens next" in a narrative had been eclipsed.