User:ThomasW/Notes PostDigitalPrint

Ludovico, Alessandro (200x) Post Digital Print

digital is built for speed, while print ensures stability Page 7

‘networking’ also becomes synonymous with the ‘sharing’ of cultural products – underexposed or otherwise invisible materials, whether printed or digital. Page 11

media theorists and marketing experts, who attempted in various ways to persuade society at large to get rid of paper, and choose instead some newer and supposedly better medium. This ongoing process seems to have originated in the early 20th century, when the death of paper was predicted – probably for the first time – after centuries of daily use. The development of public electricity networks, which enabled the mass distribution of new and revolutionary media, inspired visions of a radical change in the (still two-dimensional) media landscape, following a fashionable logic of inevitable progress which lives on to this day. Page 16

The journalist Tom Standage, writing in The Economist, went so far as to dub the telegraph “the Victorian Internet”: “The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the printing press”. Page16

Uzanne and Albert Robida in their illustrated story La fin des livres, originally published in France in 1894 in the collection Contes pour les bibliophiles. Uzanne wrote of a future world of publising which would no longer rely on the ‘static’ printed page, delivering instead all content through voice (both live and recorded) using a platform which nowadays would best be described as ‘on demand’. Page 17

Watchmakers, for example, will have designed reliable miniaturised gramophones (= iPods); the required mobile electricity (still an issue in the 21st century) is generated by harnessing the user’s physical movements (one of many contemporary ‘green’ proposals for producing clean energy). The libraries have become “phonographoteques” (= podcast repositories), while bibliophiles are now known as “phonographophiles” (= download addicts). Furthermore, in Uzanne’s vision, the author becomes his own publisher (= customised print on demand), living off the royalties of his works. Page 17

He concludes: “how happy we will be not to have to read any more; to be able finally to close our eyes”. The daily strain on the eyes from devouring news and essays, stories and novels, could at last be avoided as the ears absorbed the information, much faster and almost effortlessly. For Uzanne, the death of print positively meant the end of a tyranny – the liberation from a debilitating slavery of the eyes. Page 18

This is the background against which Bob Brown wrote his manifesto The Readies in 1930. Declaring that “the written word hasn’t kept up with the age”, Brown envisioned a completely new technology for speeding up the reading process, using strips of miniaturised text (instead of pages) scrolling behind a magnifying glass: “A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred thousand word novels in ten minutes if I want to, and I want to.” Page 19

Wells was a passionate believer in the essential role of the printing press in bringing knowledge to ordinary people; in a 1940 broadcast he discussed the importance of print for democracy, and how the ability to read and write enables us all to become “lords and masters of our fate”. And yet, only three years later (and just three years before his death), during another broadcast he declared the newspaper medium to be 10 “dead as mutton”. He denounced the excessive amount of power concentrated in the hands of an unreliable press and the “prostitution” of the journalistic profession, which made it necessary to buy “three or four newspapers to find out what is being concealed from us”; he also jokingly advocated mass book burnings in order to rid local libraries of low-quality and out-of-date publications. Finally, he predicted that people would soon prefer to receive a constantly updated news summary through their telephones… Page 20-21

‘I live right inside radio when I listen. I more easily lose myself in radio than in a book,’ said a voice from a radio poll.” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964) Page 21

Customers seemed to enjoy the ritual of buying the morning (and often also the evening) editions from their favorite newsstands. Page 21

On the first day of the strike, circulation of the Herald Tribune plummeted to 15,000 copies, but after a massive word-of mouth campaign, circulation was back up to 65,000 copies by the last day of the strike, “by far the greater portion of them in direct over the counter sales. The Tribune readers have taken the time and trouble to come far out of their way to get a copy of their favourite morning newspaper”. Page 22

“One of the unexpected effects of TV on the press has been a great increase in the popularity of Time and Newsweek. Quite inexplicably to themselves and without any new effort at subscription, their circulations have more than doubled since TV.” And even more importantly: “If telegraph shortened the sentence, radio shortened the news story, and TV injected the interrogative mood into journalism.” Page 23

McLuhan, the most visionary of mass-media theorists, spent his life analysing media. His famous division of ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ media assigned to print a very low potential for audience participation: “typography as a hot medium involves the reader much less than did manuscript”, while on the other hand “TV as cool media involve(s) the user, as maker and participant, a great deal.”17 He regarded the book as no longer 17 adequate in this new age of speed and electricity, and thus ultimately doomed:“It is the almost total coverage of the globe in time and space that has rendered

--- McLuhan, the most visionary of mass-media theorists, spent his life analyzing media. His famous division of ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ media assigned to print a very low potential for audience participation: “typography as a hot medium involves the reader much less than did manuscript”, while on the other hand “TV as cool media involve(s) the user, as maker and participant, a great deal.”17 He regarded the book as no longer 17 adequate in this new age of speed and electricity, and thus ultimately doomed:“It is the almost total coverage of the globe in time and space that has rendered the book an increasingly obsolete form of communication. The slow movement of the eye along lines of type, the slow procession of items organized by the mind to fit into these endless horizontal columns – these procedures can’t stand up to the pressures of instantaneous coverage of the earth.” Page23

“One of the unexpected effects of TV on the press has been a great increase in the popularity of Time and Newsweek. Quite inexplicably to themselves and without any new effort at subscription, their circulations have more than doubled since TV.” And even more importantly: “If telegraph shortened the sentence, radio shortened the news story, and TV injected the interrogative mood into journalism.” Page24

What’s wrong with paper?. It’s no accident that this is the title of the second chapter of a book by Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper called The Myth of the Paperless Office. Page 24

J.C.R. Licklider in his famous book Libraries of the Future, published in 1965. Licklider sketched a futuristic impression of computer-based technologies (including pen input and speech recognition) combined in order to make information easily searchable, and to overcome the inescapable limitations of paper, mainly its size and weight. Page 25

We can trace the actual expression ‘paperless office’ back to an article titled The Office of the Future, published in Business Week in June 1975. The second section of the article is titled The Paperless Office. Besides predicting how computing giants (IBM and Xerox) would dominate the office market until the end of the century, this section looks into electronic methods of managing information which were expected to reduce, progressively but drastically, the amount of paper used in the working environment. Page 25

Starting in the early 1980s (the beginning of the age of personal information) this ‘paperless’ research-and-development mantra would increasingly become a propaganda buzzword aimed at creating a large target market for selling information technology (IT). Marketing departments actively promoted a vision of massive magnetic archiving systems, destined to replace the huge amounts of messy paper, effectively de-cluttering the desktop once and for all. This meant a definitive shift towards systems of digital documents, existing only in windows on computer screens. Page 26

For example in one organization, managers banned the use of personal filing cabinets, only to find that people resorted to using their car or home offices to store their paper files.” In fact, it should be noted that ‘paperless’ has remained a recurring propaganda theme ever since – promising to not only get rid of unwanted stacks of paper, but also (and perhaps more fundamentally) to reclaim physical space. Page 26

“Print documents may be read in hyperspace, but hypertext does not translate into print”,26 and 26 so the endlessly deep narrative space made possible by the hypertext seemed destined to supplant the finite, sequential and closed format of books, eventually making them altogether obsolete. Page 27

“A print encyclopedia qualifies as a hypertext because it has multiple reading paths, a system of extensive cross-refferences that serve as a linking mechanism, and chunked text in entries separated typographically from one another.” Page 29

Actually, paper and pixel seem to have become complementary to each other; print is increasingly the medium of choice for preserving the ‘quintessence’ of the Web. The editor of printed material is the curator, the human filter, the one who decides what should be saved on a stable medium, and what should be left as a message in a bottle tossed into the sea of the Internet. So the printed page, with its sense of unhurried conclusiveness, allows to the reader to pause, to reflect, to take notes, without having to rely on electricity. And paper is also being used to preserve a substantial part of the digital culture, independently of hardware or software, describing the new media from the technical perspective of an old medium. Page 30

Ranters, a radical group which flourished during the second half of the 17th century, with heretical views on religion (if Jesus is in everyone, who needs the Church?), politics (expropriation of the rich and collective ownership of property) and sex (preaching an ideal of free love). Page 32

(The book is the) monument of the future.”43 Lissitzky considered the book as a dynamic object, a “unity of acoustics and optics” that required the viewer’s active involvement. Page35

Another radical Fluxus approach to print was to sell cheaply-made art books at prices usually associated with prestigious collector’s editions. Several Fluxus publishing houses were founded, of which Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press was probably the most well-known, pioneering the artist’s book movement with book editions running anywhere between 1,500 to 5,000 copies and sold at standard bookshop prices. Page 39

The influence of Fluxus on underground print was not long in waiting. For example, Aspen, an experimental “multimedia magazine of the arts” published by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971 and designed by various contributing artists, featured “culture along with play”: each issue came in a customised box filled with booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards – one issue even included a reel of Super 8 film. Johnson herself was later quoted as saying: “We wanted to get away from the bound magazine format, which is really quite restrictive.” Page40

The Oracle (which peaked at a print run of 150,000 copies) epitomised the idea that a magazine could be more than simply a handful of paper conveying literary and political information. By doing away with the traditional ‘static’ typographical structure, headlines could be designed rather than composed, and texts were no longer laid out as blocks of letters, but were allowed to penetrate the illustrations spread across multiple pages. Page 41

The Whole Earth Catalog’s farewell statement in 1974 was prophetic for future generations of underground publishers: “Stay hungry, stay foolish. Page 43

Also, publications such as Maximumrocknroll’s Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life contained extensive lists of contacts, essential for the survival of nomadic Punk bands, once again exploring the concept of building networks within a ‘scene’ (see also chapter 6.1.2). Page 44

For example, the zine X Ray assembled 226 copies of each issue (usually sold out), while the single-sheet Braincell brought together donated stickers and stamps, using a cheap multicolour home-publishing technique called Print Gocco.6 Page 45

These ‘fakers’ were all applying in a new way Karl Marx’s oftenquoted statement that “It is the first duty of the press to undermine the foundations of the existing political system.” Page 46

Gas Book, a publication showcasing multimedia and electronic music talents within a single package consisting of a book, a CD-ROM, an audio CD, stickers and a T-shirt. Page 48

By the late 1990s, the number of zines had exploded to an estimated 50,000, covering all kinds of social and personal themes. The zine scene featured well-attended meetings, professional distributors and dedicated sections in public libraries. As Gunderloy said in the introduction to his book The World of Zines: “The zine world is in fact a network of networks”.67 But the economic crisis of the mid-1990s took its toll on the paper zines: increases in postage rates and bankruptcies of some of the major zine distributors (most notably Desert Moon) forced the zines towards a much more cautious publishing policy. Page49

On the other hand, while our trust in print remains more or less intact, we increasingly perceive printed media as being too slow in delivering content, compared to the ‘live’ digital media which can be constantly updated minute-by-minute. This is true especially in the case of the news, which is increasingly seen as being completely ‘disembodied’. A clear sign of this is the desperate trend of online platforms attempting to speculate on ongoing news developments, by constantly anticipating what may be going on, or what is about to happen very soon – often using a vague and elusive tone designed to trick the reader into trusting that all the developments mentioned in the news have already actually taken place (see chapter 3.3). Page 51

The Yes Men’s fake but historic New York Times sheds a light on the future of publishing: here a ‘forecast’ content was printed and presented as reality, ironically demonstrating how the ‘real’ news is increasingly turning into a ‘virtual reality’: a vast, crowded, ever-changing and immersive space, endlessly navigable in different hyperlinked directions and dimensions. Page 54

Letters and Sciences wrote in a report to its members:“The vigorous brief of the Canadian Daily Newspapers Association was devoted entirely to a discussion of the consequences to the present newspaper business if the new device of facsimile broadcasting should become, as seems possible, an effective and popular rival to newspapers as we know them… this development will attract newcomers to the newspaper field, and that the facsimile reader will be able in his home to dial any one of several newspapers just as now he tunes his receiving set to radio programmes. Page 54

“A day will come when we’ll get all of our newspapers and magazines by home computers. But that’s a few years off.” The news anchorwoman concluded: “But it takes over two hours to receive the entire text of a newspaper over the phone, and with an hourly charge of five dollars the new ‘tele-paper’ would not be much competition for the 20 cents street edition”.76 Which goes to show just how radically the economics of the ‘tele-paper’ have changed since then (and particularly since the mid-00s). Page 55

In February 2007, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, announced: “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.” This statement was more or less instantly quoted (and endlessly repeated) by online news media platforms of every kind, seeing here a sign from God that their dream of many years was finally materialising. But what Sulzberger was actually saying was that within five years, the New York Times would be ready to switch to a digital-only business model. Page 55

According to Jimmy Wales, co-founder and figurehead of Wikipedia: “It isn’t that reading is going out of style – quite the opposite. It isn’t that people don’t care about quality – quite the opposite. The death of the traditional magazine has come about because people are demanding more information, of better quality, and faster.”86 And 86 Philip Meyer, in his book The Vanishing Newspaper makes the plausible prediction, based on statistics of newspaper readership in America from the 1960s to the present day, that if the current trend continues, newspaper readership in U.S. will be exactly zero by the first quarter of 2043.87. Page 56

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, replied in an interview:“We have a mechanism that enhances online subscriptions, but part of the reason it doesn’t take off is that the culture of the Internet is that information wants to be free… We’d like to help them better monetize their customer base… I wish I had a brilliant idea, but I don’t. These little things help, but they don’t fundamentally solve the problem.” Page 56

As Clay Shirky, Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, anticipated in 1995:“The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.” Page 57

What then can save the newspapers? The German advertising creative director Marc Schwieger shocked an audience at a major newspaper conference by telling them openly that they should concentrate their efforts on becoming the medium that prints “yesterday’s news”. He also believes that, if the Apple/iTunes paradigm is indeed going to become the new standard, then newspapers can learn a valuable survival lesson from the music industry: how to compensate for the loss of traditional sources of income (CD sales, print circulation) by focusing on ‘special’ and ‘quality’ products (in the case of the music industry, live concerts). For printed newspapers, the equivalent of the ‘unique experience’ of the live concert is probably the thick weekend edition – longer articles and more sophisticated content, focusing less on real-time news and more on analysis, comment and reflection. Page 57

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales asserts that “There still is value in the paper form-factor and there still is value in carefully selected ‘best of’ content, delivered on a per-issue or subscription basis.”93 And what of 93 all the other forms of periodical print? As the saying goes, “if Athens cries, Sparta does not laugh”. In the course of 2009, for example, a number of popular glossy magazines such as PC Magazine, Playgirl, Arena, Vibe, Blender, Urb and Play published their final issues (though Playgirl and Vibe have since been resurrected as quarterly or bi-monthly publications). Page 58

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president of search products and user experience, stated during a U.S. Senate hearing:“The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media. (…) The structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format. But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article.” Page 60

by Time, Inc. (discontinued after 6 issues). Mine was a free magazine based on reader preferences, compiled using content selected from the publisher’s various titles (Time, Sports Illustrated, InStyle, Money, Travel+Leisure, etc) and featuring advertisements fine-tuned to the selected content. Page 61

Alternately, the project News at Seven99 has developed a news-generating algorithm 99 which automatically produces journalistic text. The website StatSheethas been testing the system using sports statistics; the ‘imitation’ is considered successful when at least 90 per cent of readers believe the text was created by a human writer. Page 61

of presenting news specifically for the online environment. The navigation was designed to make it easy to follow specific news stories, integrating content from different sources and presenting it chronologically and by type of media. The New York Times went one step further with its Shifd project: participating users had an RFID tracking device implanted in their mobile phone, computer and television, which then followed their reading and watching behavior. A news story read halfway on the phone, could then be picked up by the computer when the user turned it on; or the TV could be programmed to play related videos. Are the news going to start following us, anticipating our tastes and moods? Certainly, the very nature of the news is becoming increasingly ephemeral – an endless stream of short news items all competing Page 62

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