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).
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