My (educated) guess is: yes, print will endure. But how?
To back up a little, I think it's important to recognize that print media is intricately connected to literacy; and most of can probably agree that literacy is important to the welfare of individuals for empowerment and essential to society (a democracy at least) for equality.
I don't want to entertain the dystopic fantasy of a culture whose literacy extends only to the level of "functional" and is dominated by the recognition of images - McLuhan described such a thing as a return to a tribal society, which was dominated by myth, homogeneity, and collectivism. Interestingly enough, the "Tribe" is being reclaimed as a social structure which empowers and privileges small-to-medium sized rhizomatic groups affiliated by shared interests rather than geography or heritage/ethnicity. Which is amazing, and laden with possibility and potential for social enterprise and innovation.
Donna Haraway predicted such structures (after McLuhan, of course) in her Cyborg Manifesto to be an empowerment of the miscellaneous and part of the social landscape after the proliferation of new media. Which it is.
There are many proponents of new media and possibilities it presents for societies to reorganize themselves along egalitarian lines; however, I have to ask what are we losing?
Democracy was supposed to be enhanced by the broadcast medium. Glenn Gould was a champion of broadcasting and recording as a democratic medium (think of Andy Warhol's assertion that the great thing about Coca-Cola was that the President could not get a better coke than the bum on the street). Gould, it's rumoured, would even play his live performances with timing and dissonance that privileged the folks deep in the cheap seats.
So, I guess there's a tension between blanket democracy and tribal democracy in which individualism and empowerment are the gambits. Back to literacy: it's important for too many reasons to get into here (maybe you can tell how I feel about literacy by the text-heavy blog posts to which I'm predisposed), but I will say that without it our sense of individuality and interiority (the basis for things like courtesy, compassion, and empathy) will undergo some drastic changes. How we read (and, equally, what we read) has, as many neuroscientists and psychologists will tell you, affects how our brains form thought and perceive people and the world in which we live.
And instead of just griping about the waning of literary fluency (which, culturally speaking, is only about 200 years old) into functional reading skills, here's something for us all to do: read.
Go pick up a magazine, like one of these:
I disagree with your premise. I think the issues of literacy and print media are entirely separate.
ReplyDeletePrint on paper is just a format. Dead-tree distribution is going to be around for a long time in some form, but it's already become the secondary means by which most people consume news and opinion. Newspapers, magazines, and other paper-based formats are losing out to online distribution because physical things cost money and bits across a wire don't. This isn't a bad thing, it actually lowers the bar for getting text in front of people's eyes. Doomsday rhetoric about the death of paper being the death of literacy is much like railing against the demise of papyrus or the venerable carved stone tablet: implausible, and probably bankrolled by the manufacturers of said papyrus or tablets.
Just because the text we read is no longer printed on paper doesn't mean we're not reading. Before I started reading online news (we're talking 1998ish, here), I used to read the newspaper every morning. I'd get through maybe 5-10 articles from one publication, once per day. Now, I read dozens of articles daily, from dozens of different sources (depending on the day), updated throughout the day.
The death of print media means more and cheaper text, not less. When the Kindle v5.0 means anyone can buy a sub-$100 device that looks and reads like a book but pulls in all the content on the 'net, that's the death of print media. But it makes reading cheaper and easier, and literacy even more essential.
What I think is essential to your post, and to the comment above, is the issue of 'how' we read. I would suggest that it is not that literacy dies with physical print, as Neil argues, but that 'how' we are literate changes. That is, how we interact with our words and information, and thus, how we interact with one another in our cultures/societies, changes. This is more McLuhan stuff.
ReplyDeleteThe increased dissemination of information experienced with online media is not the only characteristic of the virtual world that affects our literacy. If it were, little would really change, we would just read a screen instead of a page. But this is not all that changes, the means of our interaction with information changes too. And if we accept that the medium is indeed the message, our literacy will change just the same.
So then, how does the online format change the printed word from what we experienced with physical text. Well something like the Kindle would suggest not much has changed, thus literacy will not fundamentally change. But there are things like blogs or twitter that do have different formats and do impress different ways of learning and knowing upon us. What was once learned through drawn out articulate argumentation in a book was condensed to a news article of a few pages to a blog entry of a few paragraphs to a tweet of a few short hand sentences (if you can call them sentences).
It seems to me that the medium is adapting to brevity, to immediacy, so that I can get on to the other million issues that are available to read about. When our media change their nature for the benefit of quantity I wonder about our access to quality. It is this, more than the death of paper, that concerns me in regards to literacy. This is especially evident in mass media forms - the most important in a democratic society. So, literacy may indeed be undergoing an overhaul, for better or worse, Im not sure yet.
Thanks for the thoughtful replies, 'gents.
ReplyDeleteI think the whole-hog separation for media from literacy exposes an assumption about reading to which most people ascribe. The materiality of print (sustainability and waste issues notwithstanding) is a very important part of the culture that developed around the printed word during the late 18th century.
I take your point, Neil, that consumption of writing has increased since the advent of on-line publication; but what is the correlation to consumption of other forms of media? Do more people read The Economist on-line than watch mash-ups on Youtube? I kinda doubt it.
I'm not so delusional to think that my defense of print media (which has metaphysical purchase more than just words on paper) will prevent it from changing, nor do I think it's going the way of the dodo. But if kids in schools never crack the spine of Julius Caesar or if first-year uni students never again write their notes in the margins of Alias Grace, then we'll have lost a unique way of understanding the world.
Print media changed the world, and it produced a particular kind of literacy that is not present in digital reproduction. It's like the difference between the Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the TV show) and Wikipedia. One is heavy and inconvenient, rigorously researched and standardized; while the other is suggestion and layperson consensus.
Without sliding into a philosophical discussion about the a priori self, I will suggest that functional literacy and fluent literacy are different things with a host of implications for human subjectivity. Functional literacy is like being able to drive. Fluent literacy is like knowing how to drive stick, understanding how internal combustion works because you've torn down an engine before, and being familiar with the history of the automotive and oil industries and their importance to the structure of western culture.
The experiences and approach to driving of a "functional" driver and a "fluent" driver would likely be very, very different.