On Print

Disclaimer: This post was written with a kidney infection, after spending eight days at the hospital with my grandmother. It is not as cohesive as it would be if I were well.

This semester, in addition to taking The History of Communication, I'm also taking a class called Written Culture. These two courses complement each other very well, particularly this week as we look at the impact of print on thinking, writing, history, and culture. I think that we can substitute the word print with technology and look at the ways in which the evolution of communications technologies generally have shaped and continue to shape our lives.

Cochran writes that "The multiplicity of media, whether cinema, video, audio recording, or software, involves new ways of transcribing human thought for posterity and alters understandings of historical continuity. . . [M]any aspects of cultural production have become visible for the first time." (page 2) We can add to this list e-mail, blogging, tweeting, and many other forms of communications technologies that we currently use. Two things stand out: 1) new ways of transcribing human thought for posterity and 2) visible cultural production. How do our new technologies (our print replacements, so to speak) fall into these two arenas?

This past year, the Library of Congress decided to archive all public tweets. Many authors are now bypassing publishing houses and self-publishing their manuscripts as ebooks instead. These are just two examples of new ways in which we are transcribing human thought. But it begs a question. Can something digital actually be preserved for posterity? How long-lasting is a 140 character tweet, even if it is saved on a server somewhere at the LoC? While some of our technology is replacing print, I think we can safely argue, for now at least, that print is not, in fact, replaceable.

We have yet to see if/how our new technology will stand the test of time, but we can't dispute the fact that they expose cultural production in new ways. We have access to more information, and more importantly, we have access to the people who produce information. We not only see an online exhibit at a museum to which we don't have access; we also see a video with the curator describing how the piece was assembled. We can listen to an interview with an author online, but we can also submit questions that we'd like that author to answer. News is disseminated faster than newspapers are printed and (for better or worse), one doesn't need a degree in journalism to be a "reporter." The production of culture is visible now, but that doesn't mean it's good quality, or easy to find. Consumers - and producers - must be discerning in this Web 2.0 world.