Final Assessment- Question One- ‘The Publishing Industry’

1. ‘It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves—the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public—has stopped being a problem.’ (Clay Shirky, ‘Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable’,http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/). Are digital and networked media dismantling the “publishing industry”? Is it being replaced? If so, what is replacing it? If not, what is the publishing industry becoming, and how is it doing so? Are there new difficulties and complexities or expenses involved?

Throughout the course of human existence the act of publishing has been an extremely important and powerful tool used to benefit the development and growth of society. Joost Van Loon writes in ‘Network’ that “the network has been highly conducive to theorising phenomena and processes such as globalisation, digital media (Internet), speed, symbiosis and complexity.” [http://tcs.sagepub.com.wwwproxy0.library.unsw.edu.au/content/23/2-3/307] If we analyse these elements that have attributed to the growth of networks and communities we can see that they are all linked to the notion of publishing, growth and communication. Publishing is essentially a platform for the distribution of information to the greater community,  the term ‘publishing’ stemming from the the notion to “make something public or generally well known.”

Clay Shirky explains in his article ‘Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,’ “when someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution” [http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/]. The writer ultimately warns the reader about the dangers of naivety and oversight for those loyal to print media. Shirky makes an interesting observation, comparing the printing revolution, inherently understood as an result of Gutenberg’s Printing Press, to the “revolution” we are experiencing now, as more and more physical content is being replaced with digital information. What is interesting about Shirky’s comparison, is that in both circumstances there was and is an uncertainty as to how these revolutions or changes were and are affecting society and in what direction these advancements in technology will take us.

The key quote illuminated in the assessment question, focuses on whether, “it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because of the core problem publishing solves.” What Shirky is alluding to in this quote is the notion that, due to the immediacy and availability of digital content the publishing industry, once an extremely powerful and influential enterprise is becoming redundant. Caroline Basset explains in ‘Digital Media’ that, “divisions between traditionally complementary approaches, based on a division between the sphere of the literary and the sphere of life itself, may need to be rethought” [http://ywcct.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/1/138.full]. Both Basset and Shirky seem to stress the importance of change and adaptation, regarding traditionalism and loyalty to print media as simply unrealistic and a form of idealism.

In the era prior to the “movable type,” literacy rates were low and education was restricted to members of the aristocracy and members of the Catholic Church. Based on earlier screw presses the German Johannes Gutenberg, designed a model that could print around three and a half thousand pages per work day as opposed  around forty hand written pages. This was undeniably a far more effective method, not only for printing information, but later for receiving and understanding content. During the 1500’s literacy rates boomed, Shirky explaining how as “books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.” Aldus Manutius,  Venetian printer and publisher, benefitted the printing industry greatly with the invention of the ‘octavo’ volume,’ as well as italic type, redefining both the size and portability of what we now perceive as the everyday book.

Phil Kurz explains ‘Broadcast Engineering,’ that “the Web is an unlimited opportunity to expand the idea of localism to the umpteenth degree” [http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=7eb5179a-0ce3-4d1d-a350-6d151e072002%40sessionmgr13&vid=2&hid=19%5D. Shirky conclusively contributes the decline of the printing press to the expense of its processes. The writer acknowledges the notion that “for a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics.” Prior to any form of digitisation, the newspaper was essentially the only media outlet, meaning that a handful of newspapers in specific areas were able to create a complete oligopoly within the media market. Though the process of printing was an extremely costly and labour intensive process, newspapers had little in the way of modes of competitors in other meaning that information was extremely difficult to plagiarise and share information.

What Shirky deems to be the main downfall of the newspaper was the print corporations failure to accept and even comprehend the worse possible scenario. Shirky explains that, “the problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming,” merely that they could not fathom the extent that the internet would revolutionise the sharing and freedom of information. While television expanded and popularised the idea of visually stimulating media, the web 2.0 created an immediacy and non-linear format for information content to move around. Most of all the internet gave to generations following the notion that information and all data should be free.

Michael Erard writes in, ‘A short Manifesto on the Future of Our Attention,’ how political scientist Herbert Simon in 1971 believed that, “the more information, the less attention, and the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it,” [http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=10297]. This immediacy or ability for information to move in a lucid and almost live manner completely revolutionised how we interact with media content. Shirky tells how, “the unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking.” Ultimately what the internet provided, was a borderless space for content to grow and move within, triggering an unimaginable boom within the digital network.

If we go back to the definition of ‘publishing’ we can see that it isn’t restricted to purely print media. While the term builds connotations or stigmas about physically printing, the idea of “making something public or generally well known,” extends past the boundaries of the physical. In answer to the question of whether the internet is deteriorating and dismantling the publishing industry my personal conclusion is no, simply due to the reason that digital media if anything is making information more widely available and received to the general public in an endless array of formats. What digital media is dissolving though is print media, and one of the reasons, as Erard explains is that “making something ‘free’ is obviously an allocation strategy. ‘Free’ attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well.”

Erard’s insite leads into the question of what the publishing industry is becoming, and how the idea of ‘free’ information is affecting standards of journalism. Shirky writes how “the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.” Though the newspaper industry had complete control over the media market for almost two centuries, their practices had developed to the point where a professional standard was expected of all newspapers, and any libel or falsities would lead to legal disputes and prosecutions. The closure of the ‘News of the World’ on the July 10 2011, ended 168 years of publication. The closure  was entirely due to misconduct by certain journalists at the paper, illuminating how people engage with journalism and hold a certain expectation for the standards of it. One could question whether the expectation of paper sales triggered the desperation to provide interesting content at any cost.

So what has been newspapers response to the digital revolution? While many have attempted to appropriate the newspaper and simply adapt it to the form of an online journal, the digital paper in many ways has failed to succeed due to the immediacy and availability of information on the web. Shirky poses the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” answering his own question with the idea that “nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.” While Shirky’s idea of the future of journalism is a fairly bleak and cynical, Johnah Lehrer writes in ‘The Future of Reading,’ “I also recognize the astonishing potential of digital texts and e-readers. For me, the most salient fact is this: It’s never been easier to buy books, read books, or read about books you might want to buy. How can that not be good?”

Unfortunately the speed that is expected from media websites is almost unimaginable and at times unmanageable, which in some ways has turned reporting into more of a race or competition. This has in many ways has lowered the quality of journalism as sources and stories are copied and often not double-checked. While this is an extremely negative side-effect of the digitalisation of journalism, the need for quality journalism is still present and possibly even more relevant in this day and age. Shirky explains how, “now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.” Erard writes how he imagines “attention-based pricing, in which prices of information commodities are inversely adjusted to the cognitive investment of consuming them.” Though media platforms are being reshaped and are evolving, the appreciation and willingness people have to invest in quality journalism may just be the saving grace for the industry.

The popularity of the Apple ‘Ipad’ and Amazon’s ‘Kindle’ at the very least gives hope to journalists and media enthusiasts that there still is a platform for publishing news and information. According to  Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee, ‘Ipad’ sales for the year of 2012 should reach upwards of 55 million. The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolutionitself like?” If books and printing improved literacy rates in the 1500’s then surely the opportunity to gain greater exposure of information in the 21st century will improve our thirst for information and knowledge in relation to good journalism. In many ways we should be grateful that the publishing industry has lost it’s bureaucratic threshold, as it has created numerous opportunities for smaller agencies and entrepreneurs. Shirky explains how, “many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

Shirky vindicates the notion that, “society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable.” What is becoming ostensible is the notion that there will always be some form of quality journalism in the digital age. While there is still some hope for print media Shirky writes, “what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.” Ultimately we should use this time to experiment with new ideas and methods of publishing, while at the same time keeping in mind the importance for truthful and well written journalism and with this the “publishing industry” shall not be lost.

Platforms

Platforms can be understood as a structural or technological form from which various products can emerge without the expense of a new process/technology introduction. They are essential for supporting specific content particularly in a world where categorising and ordering information is quintessential. Platforms can be digital and physical, whilst they play an important role in connecting people and information. In the article ‘Assembling Collective Thought,’ Anna Munster and Andrew Murphy explain how, “so much new media composition and production still concerns itself with technological conduits and infrastructure.” The idea behind ACT simply put is to create a different platform for interaction and patterns of information.

Personally I am very much interested the website ‘Soundcloud,’ a music platform as it allows me to share and make my own music available to other musicians. It operates as a free website, until you use up a certain amount of memory on the site and after that you are able to pay for additional space and other perks as a greater download capacity for people listening to your music. The platform  serves completely as a virtual space concentrating specifically on digital music content.

Evidently ‘Soundcloud’ also works as a platform between other social networking sites. This is an extremely important tool especially in terms of marketing for the network.

 

 

 

 

 

The popularity of many of these networking sites has blossomed from the interactive and interpersonal attributes which they offer. Whilst platforms use to be purely for companies and corporations to market their own products and interests, some of the most successful companies in the 21st century are in fact these platforms in which the public interact with.If we take a look at the website VjTheory.net their mission statement explains how “the website is a growing collection of articles, references and art projects in collaboration with contributors from the book and the growing community.” Again this idea of a network or a platform introduces the notion of a community, where it is the people who are the most important part of the medium. Similarly social networking sites such as ‘Facebook,’ ‘Twitter,’ ‘Flikr’ and ‘Tumblr’ all inhabit and explore personal themes within their marketing scheme in order to illuminate their role as a place for personal communication, a digital conversation as such.

Another interesting aspect of the digital platform is its ability to connect with the physical. Websites such as ‘Amazon’ and ‘Ebay’ are able to order and store digital content and act as a platform for online buyers to purchase physical objects. A particular legal loophole which has opened up in the last few years has been the trading of illegal goods online. The ‘Silk Road,’ has been a major international contention for a large number of governments as the site acts as a platform for trading physical items digitally allowing strong anonymity. Using a currency known as bitcoins, a crypto-currency, buyers are able to purchase illegal items and substances through anonymous auctions. An administrator claims “over 99% of all transactions conducted within the escrow system are completed to the satisfaction of both buyer and seller, or a mutually agreed upon resolution is found.

One could say the internet itself was a platform for other platforms, so essentially the digital or virtual world is just a construct dependent on people and platforms to connect information. It will be extremely interesting to see how these platforms develop and change over time acting as gateways or paths into a new era of intermediacy.

 

 

‘Does visual media work differently to other media forms?’

The subject of visual forms of media working differently to other platforms for information is an interesting one, and cannot just be simplified with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. While different mediums of communication such as a video or photograph clearly function in antithetical ways to say something in writing, if they are both communicating the same idea, in a way they are performing the same role, working as a platform for this particular message.

The web has undoubtably seen the rise of the ‘visualisation,’ where in a way the importance of the written word has declined and the aesthetics and measures of visual communications have soared. This can be mainly linked to the effectiveness of the visual media form, where a simple design or graphic is able to convey a staggering amount of information. This can undoubtably be traced back to the earliest forms of photo-communication in old advertisements such as this one for Coca-Cola-[http://www.thatsrich.com/pics/cocacola/images/image008_2.jpg]. The image has clearly conveyed a number of positive ideas about the product with little emphasis on the written word. Using this semiotic principal of using signs and meaning the ‘visualisation’ similarly is able to communicate a gross amount of content and information simply through a visual representation. If we examine this brief article entitled, ‘Tracking & Visualising the use of Software Applications,’ we are able to see how a program takes date and changes its form into a visual image. The article explains how “this tracked data is stored in a text file, which can be uploaded and then visualised. Individual software programs are represented by different colours.” [http://infosthetics.com/archives/2012/05/threadwatch_tracking_and_visualizing_the_use_of_software_applications.html]

In many ways this visual mode of communication is beginning to take control of the media market. The recent drop in Fairfax shares alongside other print media companies suggests that the decreasing popularity of these mediums are being lost to online journalism, which unquestionably depends on aesthetics and visual materials to capture peoples attention. In this sense one could argue that the visual form of communication is far more effective in simply communicating an idea. 

If we take a minute to analyse even a fairly small screenshot of todays homepage of the SMH website we are able to see how the majority of the information on the page is visual and our eyes are drawn to the images and graphics on the page. The writing here almost works as an aid or caption to assist the visual mode. 

 

 

 

In a recent article in the economist entitled ‘Data, data everywhere,’ James Cortada a computer scientist for IBM explains that, “we are at a different period because of so much information. The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts.” As a result of this, it is important that we uncover new methods of projecting these great masses of information. The popularity of new media platforms such as ‘Twitter’ and ‘Instagram’ is due to the simplicity in the format of these programs. ‘Twitter’ only allows for a 140 characters per post, stressing an importance for concise and accurate communications. It seems like the same format is being applied to many platforms with a great amounts of information, the visual simplicity of a website a key factor of its popularity.

Ultimately the great mass of content that todays generation are expected to take in has generated a need for visual simplicity. In this sense visual media works in a more concentrated form, although the message still stays the same.

Privacy

The issue of ‘Privacy’ has been a major bone of contention ever since the earliest forms of networking and distribution of information. Now with the highest number of people connected to the Internet and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, fears about privacy and the line between public and private content is being severely questioned.

While the video ‘How the Internet can Read Your Mind’ [http://www.shockmd.com/2012/05/02/how-the-internet-can-read-your-mind/] explains the rudimentary process in which certain programs are able to formulate and estimate to an extent a “picture of your life,” the video in my opinion does not convey the dangers of these programs and how they can lead to personal information being misused for ulterior marketing ploys. The video explains how programs are able to pinpoint a persons location to within 100 metres using GPS coordinates available from Twitter’s tracking system. The same process is used to estimate who you may become friends with in the future and can assume your sexuality with an 80% rate of success. Though suggesting the many “positive” aspects of a program storing a litany of personal information, such as “identifying medical conditions” & “recommending good places to eat,” the video forgets to mention some of the negative elements of companies collecting personal data.

For one this information that is being filed has not been directly consented by the vast constituency of users. Many people who use these social media outlets are unaware that their personal information is being harvested and used for these networking companies gain. The article ‘Twitter is Tracking You on the Web,’ explains how, “every time you visit a site that has a follow button, a ‘tweet this’ button, or a hovercard, Twitter is recording your behaviour. It is transparently watching your movements and storing them somewhere for later use. Right now, that data will make better suggestions for accounts you might want to follow.” If we take into consideration how much we rely on computers for personal day-to-day activities it’s fairly obvious that a large portion of things we do online are private. Obviously I do not mean this in any suggestive manner, although many of our activities online such as  banking, what we might Google or order online, and conversations with friends and family

Infotention

I find the idea of the ‘Commons Movenment,’ quite an interesting one. Stefan Meretz describes the idea of ‘Commons,’ in ‘Ten Theses about Global Commons Movement’ as more of a “global interrelated character,” as opposed to just a “coherent agent.” I personally interoperate the notion of a “coherent agent,” as a broader and more simplistic term that can often pigeonhole a certain social trend. One could compare the notion of the commons to the idea of communism or socialism, which indeed it can attribute many of its elements to. Jay Walljasper’s article, ‘The Commons Movement is Now,’ characterises the ‘Commons,’ as more of a “political mood,” explaining how, “growing numbers of citizens—including many who never before questioned the status quo—now seem willing to explore new ideas that once would have seemed radical.”

Michael H. Goldhaber, questions the idea in ‘Attention Shoppers,’ of the “information society,” where people are employed specifically to “manage and deal with information.” Howard Rheingold writes in his blog that, “I receive tons of new information related to my work every day and often it feels overwhelming. So it is very easy to overlook important information that can impact our business.” This is where the idea of “infotention” sprung from, suggesting that we are only able to receive and take in a certain amount of content on the web. Rheingold explains how we need to train ourselves to manage and file this information, which is ultimately a “combination of attentional discipline and information-handling tools,  a method for turning information overload into knowledge navigation.”

James Temple writes in ‘All Those Tweets, Apps, Updates May Drain my Brain,’ that “the modern world bombards us with stimuli, a nonstop stream of e-mails, chats, texts, tweets, status updates and video links to piano playing cats,” which is ultimately leading to “growing concern among scientists that indulging in these ceaseless disruptions isn’t good for our brains, in much the way that excessive sugar or fat – other things we evolved to crave when they were in shorter supply.” Are our attention spans shortening with this increasing amount of information being virtually thrust in our faces each day? Tiffany Woolf illuminates some of the problems she had with cognitive functions, explaining how she often finds herself reaching for her phone when spending time with her son, whilst wanting to check her e-mail while her kids what television. Maybe these patterns have engraved themselves into our muscular memory. I guess this is why companies such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ have so much power and control, as they are apart of almost all of our daily routines.

The volatile political mood of our era bears some resemblance to the late 1970s when liberalism was losing its footing and conservative policy makers refashioned their old political rhetoric, based on social exclusion and apologies for capitalism, into a shiny new philosophy: “the market.” Previously the thrust of right-wing thought had been focused on what they were against (civil rights, labor unions, social programs, etcetera), but by claiming the market as their mission, they were able to emphasize instead what they were for. The success of that rebranding has led to many of the problems we now grapple with today.

Goldhaber also goes on to explain how, “activists across many social movements, now aware that an expansive political agenda will succeed better than narrow identity politics and single-issue crusades, are starting to experiment with the language and ideas of the commons. This line of thinking also makes sense to some traditional conservatives who regret the wanton destruction of our social and environmental assets carried out in the name of a free-market revolution.” We are able to see these social movements influenced by the power of technology and networking in scenarios such as Occupy Wall-street, which triggered a mass outburst of social frustration around the world.

Michael Erard explains in, ‘A short Manifesto on the Future of Our Attention,’ how political scientist Herbert Simon in 1971 believed that, “the more information, the less attention, and the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Ultimately, I feel that it is important to manage our time and the amount of certain information that we absorb each day. My Mum is adamant about the idea of “everything in moderation,” and I see this as an important idea to stand by.

 

‘Archive Fever’

It is fascinating to think that archiving began as a an almost elitist and authoritarian process, that is looking at it from today’s perspective, where the Internet has given the impression that everything should be free including being able to publish personal material. Matthew Ogle’s explained in  ‘Archive Fever,’ “how long it took to adjust to life without the warm twitchy blanket of what’s called ‘the real-time web.'” Matthew Ogle’s article also highlights the “early 90s, philosopher Jacques Derrida, who made a useful observation on technology’s relationship to human memory and conceptions of ‘the archive.'” Derrida wrote that “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content,” while it also creates precise records of certain events. I noted on BBC2’s production of Stephen Fry’s  Planet World that the documentary made an interesting point on language and how peoples emotions and attitudes vary depending on the different dialects they use. This in a sense is similar to Derrida’s argument about how different ways of storing information can influence the structure and the content produced.

Though Derrida explains how, we must have a “nostalgic desire for the archive,” Ogle makes the point that “the real-time web also captures something we might not have created otherwise,” writing how, “we’ve all become accidental archivists; our burgeoning digital archives open out of the future.” A personal example I can link to this would be the Vietnam war, in which for the first time, journalists had the technology and permission to report on the destruction with no bias or hidden agenda. This was the first case in history really, where people, (particularly American citizens,) protested against their own government to stop a war. This was all thanks to the exposure and documentation of the utter destruction it was causing by the media. In the same way, the recent Libyan conflict has been widely documented an archived thanks to the mass amount of technology including camera phones and widespread access to the internet.

This photo seems quite relevant for this topic..

Julie Enszner writes in ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida’, that “the nature of an archive is to be both authoritarianly transparent and authoritatively concealed.” Ironically, while the elitist mode that publishing and archiving began at once was used to enhance power and authority, the access to a wide variety of publishing platforms, (thanks to the internet,) has given this power and authority back to the people. This can be seen in internet platforms such as ‘Wikileaks’ where information has been archived on a public platform in order to expose wrong doings in the world that may have been swept under the rug otherwise. Ultimately Enszner writes how Derrida once stated, “It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come”

 

Assemblages

In some ways Bruno Latour’s, “Actor-Network Theory” seems a bit broad, although the idea of “flat-ontology” does create a simpler idea in terms of understanding and funnily enough deconstructing the term assemblage. Before even reading up on the “ANT,” I automatically connected the notion to the idea of semiotics, which in a simple definition is the study of meaning and processes. The Wikipedia page described the concept as, “explaining how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole, generating explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory.) In week 3 I researched the idea of “convenience,” and spoke about the ‘Semantic Web’ and how it used information to connect and build digital structures of information almost in the same way humans use filing cabinets to organise physical content.

Though it seems like a bit of a gargantuan example, the internet itself seems like the most obvious illustration linking to the ‘ANT.’ If we take the actants, again simply being the computers, the optical networking technologies, the capacity for information and of course humans themselves, we can start to understand how the digital world or internet was constructed or assembled. Interestingly Shaviro, Stevens writes in, ‘DeLanda: A New Philosophy of Society’ about the importance of these actants, stating “the entities themselves are the absolutes.” While Steven’s writes about Margaret Thatcher’s well known quote, “there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and their families,” he later goes on to make an interesting point that the individual could never survive if it wasn’t for the society that he or she were living in.

Really the ‘Actor-Network Theory,’ can be applied to anything and in terms of ‘assemblage,’ it is important to understand even the most minimal contributions to any sort of process. Stevens writes how, “this is not to say that the entity is entirely determined by these relations.” Really the theory developed by Latour, can only really give insight to the development of a project, not to how this construction will effect society and will lead to change.

 

Modes of Publishing

In some ways it has been absolutely fascinating to witness and grow up during the rise of the World Wide Web. Really, my generation has lived through a momentous past 20 years in terms of communications and publishing. The clip, “Internet of Things,” tells us that there are approximately 2 billion people connected via some medium to the Internet. It is estimated by 2020 that there will be close to 50 billion objects connected to the digital platform, averaging around 6 objects per person. It’s strange to think that while it took thousands of years to develop tools for publishing, specifically inventions such as the Gutenberg press, it has only been in the last 20 years that the world has developed a digital platform that is able to network such a large amount of people and create this global environment. There is no question that the Internet as such is the most important and effective mode of publishing to this day.

A documentary I watched recently that was quite interesting was “Page One,” which focused specifically on the rise of the internet and how in many ways the medium is making print journalism obsolete. The documentary focused on the New York Time and it’s financial problems as a result of the popularity of digital media. I found it quite amusing that the Times gave it a pretty dire review, writing “‘Page One’ careers around the aisles picking up this item and that one, ultimately coming home with three jars of peanut butter and no 2-percent milk.” Though the documentary was a tad vague and at times a bit repetitive, it did bring up some interesting points about this change. One of the key issues that they raised was the notion that if print media was dissolved, so would quality journalism. This lies behind the idea that if corporations such as the New York Times, were not able to pay anyone, there would be no one to perform the act of reporting quality and decent news.

Dan Gillmore from his article ‘The New York Times Paywall,’ explains how “there are few news organisations whose survival I consider essential; the Times is one. Which is why I take modest pleasure in the news that its new online subscription service isn’t failing. Last month, the paper announced it had more than doubled the number of paid digital subscribers to about 250,000, and that, overall, it had more than 1 million digital subscribers (including those paying for other editions, such as Kindle and print, who also get access to the website).” Ultimately, the documentary “Page One” and Dan Gillmore’s article allude to the idea that while the print medium may be on its way out, it is quintessential for quality journalism to continue in some form, Gillmore writing, “I want to pay for good work, and, in this case, I’m glad to do so.”

eReader

I remember meeting the Kindle for the first time just over two years ago. It was eloquently positioned atop a stack of books, although much like a new sibling or a dank patch of mould in the corner of the bathroom, the new gadget was at first treated by myself with much curiosity and skepticism. My Mum had been given it from Penguin following the launch of her latest book, the new tablet, an apparent solution to the book. Lynn Neary writes in ‘E-Book Boom Changes Book Selling and Publishing,’ “the traditional e-book, which means an e-book that just pretty much takes the print and transposes it to a digital device, and so you just are reading the print.” While I understood at the time the positive attributes of the Kindle, the hoarder and partial traditionalist inside me seemed strongly opposed to the notion of reading a digital book as such.

While for me there is nothing like physical experience of reading a living and breathing book, I do realise in this day and age  that it is impractical to be something of a neo-ludite. There is no denying that the increase in publishing platforms such as the kindle, the ipad and iphone to name but some have somewhat taken away from the power of print. The ‘Shatzkin Files’ by Mike Shatzkin explains how his father, “was active with significant publishers, the quarter century following World War II,” observing “that very few books actually took in less cash than they required,” so in this sense “just about every book brought back somewhat more revenue than it required to publish it.” According to ‘Productivewriters.com,’ the E-book sales were up 164.4% in 2010, showing clearly that the amount of print sales must be down as a result of this digital boom.

My Mum, Alison Stewart is finding it increasingly hard, not only to be published/ sell printed editions of her book, but to publish and promote herself and her work via means of the internet. Whilst she has had several books published in previous years, she has never experienced such pressure from her publishing agency in keeping up with her “virtual persona” as such. This is her site at Goodreads.com where she is constantly attending to comments and questions about her latest book “Days Like This,” http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/604016.Alison_Stewart.

Though her latest book does come in the form of an E-Book, she is quite unclear as to how the process is working as such. John Naughton talks about the “amount of control” these devices have over the reader in his article “The Original Big Brother is Watching you on Amazon Kindle.” The writer explains how these electronic texts “radically tilt the balance in favour of content-owners in a single decade.” While these devices are an improvement in terms of “ergonomics, portability and storage capacity,” it is still a bit of a worry that the reader and buyer does not have any physical ownership of the property, Naughton using an Orwell’s ‘1984’ in order to highlight how the current generation are “sleepwalking into a nightmare of perfect remote control.”