User:Eleanorg/annotation/Post Digital Print

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chapter 1: The Death of Paper (which never happened)

  • Death of paper has been announced periodically since the early 20th century
  • Telegraph, radio, then television seemed to predict takeover of books by audio/visual media
  • 'Paperless office' hype of the 70s-80s also failed as screens are a poor imitation of physical paper
  • Hypertext (not a new medium, but a new concept for dealing with reading) - finally offered something paper could not
  • However, our attachment to printed paper remains - albeit with new 'hypertextual' ways of thinking (eg Wikipedia's web-to-print software)

chapter 2: A History of Alternative Publishing Reflecting the Evolution of Print

  • 20th century avant-garde/s re-imagined the book/magazine but didn't do away with it as a paradigm
  • Dadaists, Futurists, Surrealists & Fluxus challenged how publications were composed & distributed
  • Cheap new printing technology (mimeograph, Xerox) facilitated DIY publishing in 60s-80s
  • Mail Art anticipated networked publishing of the WWW
  • Digital content added to print media in 90s as 'bonus content' (e.g. free floppy disc with magazine)
  • by 2000 print zines have been overtaken by blogs
  • Fluxus artist Dick Higgins' prediction of 'intermedia' now a reality

chapter 3: The Mutation of Paper: Material Paper in Immaterial Times

  • Printed newspapers dying, or adapting to new distribution models (e.g. Evening Standard: free, funded by ads)
  • Need for periodicals to shift their focus to providing 'best of' summaries of yesterday's news
  • The situation of online news: aggregation and 'atomising content' into user-curated feeds
  • The emergence of 'predictive news' in the 24hr news environment, and artworks responding to it
  • The importance of the physicality of printed paper
  • POD sees paper taking on attributes of digital media: instant, updatable, customizable

chapter 4: The end of paper: can anything actually replace the printed page?

  • "Rhetoric"/"propaganda mantra" (p.83) of e-publishers urges us to abandon space-consuming books, as mass digitization (Project Gutenberg, Google Books) becomes a reality.
  • Drawbacks of ebooks: clumsy hardware and proprietorial software culture (e.g. Kindle DRM, tracking, remote deletion etc) (p.88)
  • The return to "good old" book/magazine layout as the best interface, inserting multimedia rather than re-inventing whole design (e.g. iPad editions) (p.92-93)
  • Devices are emerging to display newspapers onscreen, AND to print out digital files - "to bring virtual, real-time content 'offscreen'" (p.97)
  • Various serious/experimental ways of distributing files: .pdf torrents, book scanning software...
  • Digital can learn from paper's long design history. Paper can learn from digital's atomization of content. (p.117)

Chapter 5: Distributed Archives: Paper Content from the Past, Paper Content for the Future

  • Online giants are using the kudos of mass digitization to flog paper books (eg Amazon's 'search inside') (p.199).
  • Marketing strategy of "extreme teasing" (p.199) with the illusion of free access. Eg Google Books - copyright restrictions stop you reading the full text.
  • Danger of corporates becoming centralized archives. DIY alternatives include Internet Archive, UNESCO World Digital Library, Open Content Alliance.
  • 'Digitization' does not equal 'archiving'. Archiving means preserving the original (p.127). Digital files make content accessible, but are unstable (p.124).
  • Alternative to corporate 'mega-archives' - grassroots efforts that are aggregated/searchable is a good aim.
  • Also - 'scrapbooking' as an approach to intelligent filtering/organizing of content: "a repository of personally relevant content" (p.136). Need for a FLOSS alternative to Evernote, which would allow "clipping out exactly what we need... and compile the result into (for example) PDF files" (p.137).

Chapter 6: The Network: Transforming Culture, Transforming Publishing

  • We can treat even printed works as 'nodes' because they refer to external content or are part of a series.
  • Publishers should embrace this 'network' of texts rather than fighting their own corner.
  • Not all nodes are equal: quality-control is assured through reputation and establishing authority (p.139).
  • "Quality ecosystem" online is fast and ruthless, as "news of what is or isn't worth the time and effort" spreads fast (p.139).
  • Even print publications rely on (distribution) networks - most obviously when repressed; eg networks used by bootleggers/activits/Mail Artists.
  • These distro networks shared "essential principles and structures... of the network, including the element of reputation-based hierarchy." (p.140)
  • RL example: Mag.net (a network of independent publishers). Crucially, realized that "not everything should be decided collectively" (p.144).[1]
  • Documenta 12 Magazines project: collectively edited magazines by a selected editorial team. Users could assemble their own edition through online interface. (p.145) Apparently hijacked by D12 curators, taking public content offline & curating 3 books themselves.
  • The support of physical transport networks is needed to distribute publications; these have many parallels to digital networks. Examples of DIY physical distro tactics (pp.147-149).
  • Conclusion:
    • "The network is the most efficient and manageable structure for the support and distribution of publishing efforts" (p.150)
    • "role of publishers... if best fulfilled through free and open connection to other 'nodes'" (p.150).

Afterword (by Florian Cramer)

  • 'Post digital' refers to a condition where the digital revolution has passed; digital media are ubiquitous.
  • Music has reached & passed this stage. But book & mag publishing is still on the cusp of the 'revolutionary' period.
  • This revolutionary stage is filled with "fruitless debates [about] the percieved or real threat of these [digital] technologies to the field book, magazine and newspaper publishing" (p.162).
  • Debate is split along a false (& ideological) dichotomy: networked digital culture vs. print media.
  • False dichotomy is fueled by conflation of 'book' and 'print'. If we use artist Ulises Carrion's idea of the book as a "symbolic form" (p.163) it makes sense that books can migrate between media just as music tracks do.
  • In reality, there is an explosion of artists print publications which also use blogs etc - so not just a "retro" paper fetish (pp.162-163), and suspending the false digital/print dichotomy.
  • However, artists books today emphasize their materiality - from "bookworks to printworks" (p.163).
  • Ludovico's Italy under Burlosconi shows how this dichotomy needn't apply: non-institutionalized artists were united in using print & digital media as DIY forms.
  • Using Carrion's idea of book as symbolic form, "neither purely visual-tactile printmaking, nor a mere website or text file would 'qualify' [as post-digital]... post-digital print would need to include networked community sharing which is both local/tangible and global/digital; the union of the two opposites of formation and in-formation" (p.165).


1. See "Production is not democratic" comments re: Mag.net in interview here: http://www.labforculture.org/fr/ressources-pour-la-recherche/contenu/recherche-en-cible/les-blogs-culturels-en-europe/interview-de-alessandro-ludovico-neural-it

"As a network, we learned from the first Magnet reader. It came about in a period when there was no activity, and the network was about to die. We received an invitation by CCA in Glasgow to participate in a conference and present a reader we were loosely assembling. At that point I thought that this was the only opportunity to get it done, and that was the end of the whole idea of democratic decision-making, of discussing everything together. In the end I’m with my friend Geert from Staalplaat label who once said: production is not democratic. I think he’s right! "

my notes

Main points of interest:

  • Need for periodicals to shift their focus to providing 'best of' summaries of yesterday's news
  • The situation of online news: aggregation and 'atomising content' into user-curated feeds
  • POD sees paper taking on attributes of digital media: instant, updatable, customizable
  • Digital can learn from paper's long design history. Paper can learn from digital's atomization of content. (p.117)
  • Also - 'scrapbooking' as an approach to intelligent filtering/organizing of content: "a repository of personally relevant content" (p.136). Need for a FLOSS alternative to Evernote, which would allow "clipping out exactly what we need... and compile the result into (for example) PDF files" (p.137).
  • "Quality ecosystem" online is fast and ruthless, as "news of what is or isn't worth the time and effort" spreads fast (p.139).

Ludovico has said elsewhere that "production is not democratic"; while Florian's afterword stresses that "post-digital print would need to include networked community sharing". What could democratic web-to-print production look like? How can web-to-print handle the inherent editorial hierarchies necessitated by editing down into a single publication? - OR, how could the flat structure of internet inspire a non-singular paper publication (thus allowing for discord/democracy)?

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