Death of print? Not in the near future
Even as many countries, barring India and
China, have moved away from the print to the Internet, the latter may confuse
us and constrict our thinking
We live in exciting times. Marshall McLuhan
would have termed this as a brand new world of allatonceness — a world where
time has ceased, space has vanished. We now live in a global village…a
simultaneous happening. What McLuhan wrote in 1967, seems to be true today. The
onset of digital media has metamorphosed our lives, especially the way we find,
consume and use news.
It is a common belief that the age-old print
media — newspapers, magazines, books — is faced with unprecedented threats from
new-media vehicles, especially the Internet which is a whirlpool of
information. In his book, The
Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter
of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint will die in America as the last
exhausted reader will toss aside the last crumpled edition.
Delivering a lecture a few years ago at the
Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University, former Editor-at-Large of
Time Inc, Daniel Okrent professed, “Twenty, thirty, at the outside 40 years
from now, we will look back on the print media the way we look back on travel
by horse and carriage, or by wind-powered ship.” He advanced numerous arguments
to support this dictum.
Technology evolves — we have fast moved from
main frame computers to laptops — which for Okrent, was his professional life's
‘locus, library and liver'. The speed is enthralling and captivating, making us
all subservient to it — our crave for processors' speed today is as pressing as
nomads hunt for leafs! The hurried prose of the daily newspapers, what many be
called the first rough drafts of history, is giving way to ever-modifiable
contents of the web.
The rhetoric is backed by empirical evidence
as well. The Newspaper Association of America had found that the number of
people employed in the print industry fell by 18 per cent between 1990 and
2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have attracted ire of
investors. In 2005, a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of
several big American dailies, got the firm sell its papers and thus end a
114-year history. In 2006, investment bank Morgan Stanley attacked the New York
Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its
share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.
More recently, the World Association of
Newspapers and News Publishers, in its World Press Trends Survey 2016, found
that barring India and China, newspaper circulation in most developed countries
were on a decline. Print unit circulation increased by +4.9 per cent globally
in 2015 from a year earlier and showed a five-year growth of +21.6 per cent.
This is largely the result of circulation growth in India, China and elsewhere
in Asia as expanding literacy, economic growth, and low copy prices boost
newspaper consumption. India and China together accounted for an astonishing 62
per cent of global average daily print unit circulation in 2015, up from 59 per
cent in 2014. According to this report, available on the Internet, circulation
rose +7.8 per cent in Asia in 2015 from a year earlier; it fell -2.4 per cent
in North America, -2.7 per cent in Latin America, -2.6 per cent in the Middle
East and Africa, -4.7 per cent in Europe and -5.4 per cent in Australia
and Oceania.
The instant cause of beneficiary of this has
been the Internet. The Businessweek, in an April 2010 article, ‘The Print Media
Are Doomed', captured the marketing logic for the continued demise of
newspapers: “It's not that print is bad. It's that digital is better. It has
too many advantages (and there'll only be more): Ubiquity, speed, permanence,
searchability, the ability to update, the ability to remix, targeting,
interaction, marketing via links, data feedback. Digital transcends the
limitations of-and incorporates the best of-individual media.” Do we jump on to
conclude that the print is dead, or it is the beginning of the end of print? I
shall be circumspect, yet. Especially given that the reading habits of
newspapers are ingrained culturally into many of us including our younger
generation. The speed and the ceaseless chaos the Internet has caused is
another factor that will push many away from Internet.
The abyss-like character of the Internet, I
am afraid, may turn us into blind crawlers, meandering endlessly, constantly
exposed to the vulnerability of information overload. Internet will confuse us,
constrict our thinking, corrupt our senses. We may resort back to print, for
all you know. Okrent may take a leaf out the new-found obsession of modern
civilisation with ancient practices such as yoga and ayurveda. Only the form of
the print may change in the context of the rise of the Internet. It shall not
be the death of print yet, but birth of in-print.
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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