I’m noticing how book publishers and newspaper moguls are hailing the iPad as a possible ‘saviour’ of their hitherto paper-based industries. Rupert Murdoch, in particular, sees it as a way to get his closed-garden of print behind a paywall that will trickle-feed the empire.
He and the others are missing the real change that has happened. It’s a change I don’t care for myself. I’ve resisted it as best I can, but there comes a time you just have to accept that your old way of life is over. In the case of the paper-based product it will linger because the generations brought up on these media will also take a while to die off. But they will. Death IS the one thing we are sure about.
They speak as if ‘the newspaper’ and ‘the book’ are not technological and cultural artefacts but are somehow naturally-occurring substances which the human organism has been genetically hard-wired to read and absorb. They cite the figures that show we all ‘consume’ more and more print online than we once did offline. (Yes but we ‘consume’ it in a far different way to how we may have ‘consumed’ Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’.)
The idea of ‘consuming’ Tolstoy or Dostoyevski is pretty alarming. ‘Relate to’, ‘empathize with’, ‘are challenged by’, ‘have spiritual revelations…’ but ‘consume’? What does that mean?
We all know the story of Gutenburg’s printing press and the rise of reading culture – and the rise of both religious and political revolution that followed as the serfs and peasants allegedly learnt to read. Martin Luther and Karl Marx both used the written manifesto to ignite their cultural fires. Critical theology began shortly after the bible was both translated into the common tongue and churned off the first printing presses. As long as it was in Latin and no one could read it, the old theology was safe from scrutiny. In the Vulgate, it just didn’t make sense.
The whole problem for the ruling classes as reading exploded in the 18th-19th Century was to contain it to a level where workers could be instructed, managers could be informed, the gentry could converse…but no one could join the dots. Censorship became a necessity for social control. But it kept breaking down.
Folk tales and Romances were massaged into a brand new shape: the novel. The first novels were often written as exchanges of letters or as first person reports. (A new form always borrows content from an existing form.) This entertainment medium proved ideal for leisured ladies. It kept them quietly at home absorbed in fantasy…which was fine until they themselves started playing with the form: from Mme de Stael to Virginia Woolf via Jane Austen…and then Germaine Greer.
The newspaper took advantage of the next technological innovation – from hand-set press to linotype. The word ‘News’ was invented from the names of the four cardinal directions: North East West South. The newspaper was one of the major products of the Industrial Revolution. Everything about its production was about the division of labor and mechanized process.
When I was a freelance journalist in the 1980s, newspaper Union rules would not allow me to file my copy directly. No. I had to write my piece out and then dictate it over the phone to a ‘copy-taker’, who then typed it into the system. A sub-editor would then cut it to fit the space available and assign a suitably inflammatory headline.
The book business was similarly mechanized and divided. Writer and printer never met. It’s still that way. Writers Unions, Guilds and Societies still carry on as if writers and publishers were labor and management in a vicious factory system.
All this as if human society was an unchanging entity and technological advance was simply reinforcing the old ways of doing things. The primacy of print. The elevation of reading over others modes of perception. A belief that the novel was the ultimate form of human expression – that long-form, written and read, story was the key to culture.
What had escaped notice was that much of the world couldn’t read. That the Marxist and Maoist revolutions owed as much (maybe more) to the power of the visual. The Communists seized upon the old church method of using a visual Icon to ‘tell a story’. Political poster imagery reached its zenith through the Great Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s. Much of the technical and artistic innovation in film-making was driven by the Russian revolution getting its story told via silent movies. Thank you Serge Eisenstein.
And what about the rise of radio? My generation, the ‘60s generation, embraced radio to consolidate our cross-cultural identities. The transistor fueled our rebellion. The novel as a form of identity-building began to fall against the onslaught of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, et al. In post World War 2 civil wars and rebellions, the radio station became number one target to be silenced.
The old print culture – newspapers and then paperback novels – depended upon another technical innovation to be promulgated. The rapid, efficient, nation-building system of railroad tracks. The train was an essential part of print culture. The rise of the news-stand at the station.
I love Bram Stoker’s, ‘Dracula’, as a book that brought all this together. First person narration by a dozen different people – all using leading-edge technology; typewriter, Edison phonograph, dictaphone – and the plot hingeing on the efficient railway timetabling of all Europe and England. The supernatural met the Industrial Revolution and exploded!
What sort of people benefitted most from this culture? Obviously they were not dyslectic. They were not visually acute. They weren’t dancers or musicians. Old-form print culture benefitted people like myself: short-sighted introverts with powerful memories and a facility with long-form written language (a highly artificial skill, when you think of it) and a particular form of reality processing and thinking. Our preoccupations became the heart of culture. And yet we were only a small percentage of the word’s population. Heartbreakingly, the extremely short-sighted (almost blind) Aldous Huxley was assigned the task of writing Mr Magoo scripts in Hollywood.
Those skills need constant learning, rehearsing and practice. For people without a natural facility in the reading medium if another way of communicating should arise that suits their skills better, they’ll take it.
Visual communication has been growing and growing at the expense of long form written story (and newspaper feature). Visual communication is more ‘natural’ than long form story. First we hear, then we see, then we speak, and finally we may read.
Yes, we do absorb more print online now than ever before. But look at how we absorb it! And look at how much sound, vision, color and movement accompanies it. How do you teach a 13 year old to read a novel when they are constantly absorbing 2 minute Youtube posts? That’s where the synaptic links are being laid down for future communications skills. That’s why newspaper and book buying is dying. What is the point of rewriting either ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ or ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’? That form of communication has had its day. Now we learn who we are by Googling our needs and desires. That’s what I did when I began to think that I was transgendered. I didn’t need a book. I needed a Chat Room.
To communicate now we do not need a publishing factory, a railway system, and a minutely divided structure of labor and management. That’s why the old publishing/newspaper system is dying. Where is the first place news organizations go for pictures of the latest calamity? Flickr! Facebook! They pull the images and the information down and poke them through the factory and maybe 12 hours later they’re available on the street…but they’ve already done the rounds of mobile devices. The latest ‘news’ is always old news.
Newspaper barons are like the old railroad barons. Their time has passed. Putting their content up on an iPad is like screening a movie on the bridge of the Titanic (a form of mass transport made redundant by the DC3). You could have done it, but the lifeboat was probably the better option.
