I was just spending a bit of time tonight checking out A Brief Message which is a fantastic new site by Liz Danzico and Kohi Vihn. The initial article there was a brief bit discussing the possibility of print dying. There’s some good commentary that follows, people talking about Newspapers dying off or it happening really slowly, but it spurred a memory for me a while back about a spot I’d heard on NPR last year about something actually dying off—the telegram.
It’s a great example because it’s a form of communication that actually has died off, and it has a strong message we can take from it to this debate about print dying.
Things can and do get replaced by newer technologies, but it’s rare, extremely rare, which I’m guessing is why the telegram dying made the news. During the spot Robert Siegel interviewed Tom Standards, author of The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers, who said this,
> “It’s very unusual for that communiations technologies become extinct. Everyone said that TV would kill radio. Every now and then something will kill the thing that came before. The telegram is one of the very few examples of a form of communication that really has gone extinct.”
It’s quotes like this coupled with the thousands of years we have of the written word, and the 567 years we’ve had with the printing press that makes me truly start to doubt it’ll “die”. The telegram lasted 150 years and it was a fairly obscure form of communication if you ask me. People are still using Ham radios, fax machines, moorse code, tree bark writing, sidewalk cement scratching and smoke signals. We love to communicate and pridicting something like print dying screams trendy. Sure prints it’s not up and coming. It’s not hot like the online communication, but claiming it’s “dying” is incredibly bold and unnecessary. Print is lifetimes away from dying if it ever dies at all.
If it does truly “die; I’m banking on a comeback. I’m thinking around 2070 we’ll definitely need it again.
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Well-said.
The telegram has one sole purpose: to get a message from one person to another. It was replaced by another device, the telephone, which also had the same sole purpose, but managed to do it faster, more elegantly, and probably less expensively.
The print medium, on the other hand, has thousands of purposes. Until a device comes along that can perform all of them better, print will be around.
I do believe print’s day will eventually come — but it won’t be soon. And, even after it dies a commerical death, it will live on as a nostalgic art form, much as letterpress does today.
Jeff Croft: Yeah, excellent point about the one-to-one relationship. The spot on NPR likened the telegram to the text messages we have now, especially when it comes to the limited text length and the adjusted grammar we use in them. I can definitely see the text message eventually going away while I’m alive, but print no way.
I think when people pronounce “Print is dying”, I think that it’s something new for people to freak out about. The world will be a vastly different place when we don’t want to have something tangible like a book in our hands. Digital does not satisfy the human sense of touch. As mentioned, it’s a trend to think that print is anywhere near death.