Printed material is text and reading appliance in one. In the future it will be expensive. But once it has been produced, it doesn’t get broken very easily. It has one advantage: you only need light if you want to concentrate and read it in private. Light from the sun.
Arie Altena writes about art and new media; he works for V2_ in Rotterdam and co-curates the Sonic Acts Festival.
2. Better Stories – Henk Blanken
When man began to speak, around fifty thousand years ago, the earth was already billions of years old. That the word was ‘in the beginning’ is exaggerated, but yet: man became man when he started stammering and passing on his history not purely via his genes but as stories. It is our stories that distinguish us from other animals.
Stories help us forward. That went faster thanks to writing and printing, and then we discovered science and finally, as an afterthought, journalism, which began to tell stories as they were taking place.
The word has always been in power, and the power has always had the word. Journalists keep tabs on that power. Things were better when ‘the press’ was able to reach more people. At the end of last century, journalism was stronger and more powerful than ever. And there you have mediacracy.
And then things went downhill with the word. Mass media is the product of an industrialized century, just like mass consumption and mass marketing. But at the end of last century, the mass began to crumble. Rather than a silent majority, we wanted to become assertive individuals.
Thanks to Internet, just as radical as those first stammerings, we could say what we wanted. The paradigm of the mass media – press talks, masses listen – is replaced by something else: we all talk, albeit in small groups. Not the masses but the group – the clan – is the measure of the Internet.
Us and our 287 friends. The word is subject to inflation. The decline in reading has little to do with that. It is a normative term. The hours we spend reading on the Internet do not appear in the statistics. Apparently, there is a difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ words, just as there is between high and low culture. That perhaps explains why we complain about the decline in reading and at the same time worry about information overload.
Is it really so bad if we read fewer ‘high’ words, less ‘crime and punishment’ and more twitter feeds? If we lose our ability for ‘deep reading’? Or will that be replaced by associative digital network reading, via tags and ‘likes’ and links, supported by video, or an instant translation from the Arabic, which is a mess but good enough?
I hesitate. Journalists must live with the inflation of the word. And the word, just like the masses, is falling apart. The inflation of the word is the inflation of the power – and of journalism.
What saves journalists is the story. Not necessarily their story. Or that of their antagonists, the politicians. Stories originate in networks, and are not told by the masses, but by small clans. Perhaps society will eventually have enough with these new stories, but I wouldn’t want to bet democracy on it.
But journalists will have to tell better stories and tell those stories better than ever. There’s more than enough shallow news. Even stories with a head and tail, heroes and scoundrels, sweat and tears are no longer scarce. But the need for stories that tell what we share and do wrong, how we suffer and love, is as old as mankind.
Henk Blanken is a journalist and writer of books on digital culture and new media.
3. From Books to Texts – Andrew Blauvelt
It took about 300 years for the codex (the book as a set of bound pages) to rival the popularity of scrolls and another 300 years to replace it completely. This easy to read, efficient, durable, compact, portable, and randomly-accessible format multiplied with the invention of the printing press and endured for the next 1400 years. In 2010, Google estimated that there are about 130 million unique books in the world. In 2011, Google had scanned more than 15 million books and planned to have all known books scanned by the end of the decade. In 1971, Project Gutenberg was launched as the first collection of digitally formatted texts (what we now refer to as eBooks). In 2011, many booksellers reported that eBook sales surpassed their hardback equivalents for the first time. It has taken only 40 years for digital texts to rival printed books.
In a reversal of the publishing process, digitization converts an image of a book page back into language – searchable, retrievable, scalable, and translatable text. This linguistic alchemy transforms atoms into bits, the fixed materiality of a book into fungible texts. In the future, most designers will be creating reading experiences not book designs. However, the codex survives for much longer than we think. To paraphrase Kenya Hara, the physical book becomes an information sculpture – a unique, haptic, three-dimensional reading experience. Counterculture guru Stewart Brand once remarked that information wants to be free, but he also noted that it wants to be expensive because it can be valuable. In the future books will be more expensive while eBooks will be ubiquitous – their texts having already been liberated from the codex will want to be free.
Andrew Blauvelt is Curator of Architecture and Design at the Walker Art Center , Minneapolis .
4. I Read More Than Ever – Erwin Blom
I like reading. I’m crazy about print. Everyday, two newspapers fall onto the doormat, every week I buy a pile of magazines during my weekly trip along the shops. But I read each of the publications less and less. In the early morning, I can better look at Internet for current information rather than in the newspaper that went to the printers half a day ago. And for depth, I can better visit specialist sites than read magazines that wrestle every month with a scarcity of pages. No matter how much I love the printed media, I increasingly experience that they offer me insufficient added value. I am slowly saying farewell to something which has always been so dear to me.
For digital media can be text and image and sound. With digital media I can chat online with other people about the subjects that interest me. With digital media I can get customized content and therefore more of what fascinates me and less of what doesn’t interest me. And digital media are dynamic and can be current at any moment.
As far as newspapers and magazines are concerned, publishers see new distribution channels such as iPads as possibilities to repeat their old trick one more time in a new packaging. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work anywhere. Of course people buy Wired or de Volkskrant out of curiosity, but after an initial optimism, the numbers sold have drastically dropped.
It is as logical as can be, but not, apparently, for the publishers of paper. In an environment with new possibilities, I do not want to be confronted with old limitations. I want my media to be diverse (also audio and video), I want my media to be up-to-date (latest information always available), I want my media to be social (be able to share content with people), and I want my media customized (matching my interests).
Is it dreadful that people are reading less, but are getting informed in other ways? No, of course not. Is it dreadful that the reading behaviour of people is changing? No, of course not. The people that think that only a doorstop of a book can provide depth and that a summary of short messages and interactions on Twitter has no substance, have done nothing more than take a cursory view of things. Adding everything together – blogs, Twitter, mail, Facebook etcetera – I read more than ever, but increasingly less with those parties that used to have exclusive rights to reading matter.
Erwin Blom is founder of The Crowds, a company specialized in social media.
5. Encoded Experiences – James Bridle