When
publishing changes, so does society. Investigate and compare the impact of two
publication technologies, one pre-1900 and one post-2000, on a specific aspect
of society
When publishing changes, so does
society. I strongly believe in this quote as I believe the media has a
tremendous amount of subconscious control over the way we interact. However
there is a third party missing from this statement: the Internet. In the words
of Sachin Kamdar, “Publishers have been running a marathon in a pair of shoes
that are four sizes too small.” Publishing has changed because of the Internet,
therefore, society is changing is changing because of the Internet. In this
essay I will be exploring the impact that the printing press and Twitter have
had on journalism.
Firstly it is vital to have an
understanding of what the word ‘publishing’ means. The process of publishing
can be broadly defined as the distribution of information to any particular
public. Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works
such as books and newspapers, and includes the various stages of development
such as graphic design, editing, and production.
The publics grasp together to form
society, and each public can make up any specific form of publishing such as
aggregating or archiving. We are, in a sense, an assemblage. An example I use
of archiving is the act of publishing your own thoughts on paper, and directing
them, or saving them, to a ‘relevant’ place.
The emergence of
the printing press by German, Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, is regarded as one
the most significant events in media history, and in my opinion, life as we
know it. Publishing became archived and organised through books and newspapers,
and was a huge step for education everywhere. Information was now accessible to
a wider reach of people.
Remaining the
standard until the 20th century, Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press
is also accredited with printing the world's first book using movable type: the
42-line Gutenberg Bible. There only 200 copies were made, in 1452; an
interesting statistic considering “Fifty Shades of Grey” has sold over 70
million copies worldwide.
The Gutenberg
Bible’s were printed on Vellum, an expensive material made from mammal skins,
thus allowing only the ‘rich’ to acquire the book.
The Gutenberg
printing press developed from the technology of the screw-type wine presses of
the Rhine Valley, Germany. It was there in 1440 that Johannes Gutenberg created
his printing press, a hand press, in which “ink was rolled over the raised
surfaces of moveable handset block letters held within a wooden form and the
form was then pressed against a sheet of paper” (Bellis, unknown).
Mass production
did not really exist before this. Publishing on paper and being able to
mass-produce, brought on some of the most important cultural revolutions such
as the Renaissance and the formation of capitalism.
How you may ask,
could a publishing technology be what formed the basis of our society today?
Books shared knowledge, ideas, and experiences; they became a catalyst for
cultural change. In the 18th century, sovereigns or families had no public
sphere. There was no debate about whether the sovereign was right or wrong. As
things started to change, such as the formation of coffee houses and printed
press, a new space inserted itself in between the sovereign and the family: the
public space.
People and
society started to be able to ask questions about their space, such as, is this
leader truly right? Should they be representing my needs?
According to
McLuhan (1962), it was the Gutenberg evolution of printing that instilled the
notion of the public in society. The printing press was indeed a milestone for
observing how mass-publishing and direct messages to the public, affected the
organisation of society. According to Eisenstein (2001), the impact caused
major social, economic and political transformations. She also argues that it
facilitated the reformation of liberalism and the development of the scientific
method (Geiselhart, 2001).
Technology of
the printing press went on to be further improved in the Industrial Revolution.
By 1470 in France, 1489 in England, and by 1533 in ‘The Americas”, printing
presses had made their way around the world.
A fun fact to
keep you interested: King Ptolemy I Soter in Alexandria created the first
library in -295. He asked the former governor of Athens, Demetrios Phalereus,
to collect all the books in the inhabited world. This included works by poets,
prose-writers, rhetoricians, doctors, and historians. Foreign vessels that
docked in Alexandria were constantly rummaged through for scrolls and
manuscripts.
The emergence of
coffee shops and the age of gossip in the 18th century as discussed
before, can similarly be seen in a new and improved replicated form: Twitter.
A publishing
technology in it’s own right, it is an online social networking and
micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based
messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".
Created in March
2006, it has over 500 million users generating 340 million tweets a day. It has
been described as the SMS of the Internet. Twitter usage spikes during
prominent events, the current record for usage was on January 1st
2013 in the Japanese time zone as the New Year begun, reaching 33,388 tweets
per second.
Twitter has been
known to organise protests, referred to as ‘Twitter Revolutions’, such as the
2009-2010 Iranian election protests. In retaliation, the Iranian government
blocked the service. Some have described Twitter as a strategic weapon, with
the ability to re-align social order in real time.
Now to the fun
part of the essay: comparing the impacts of these publication technologies on
journalism.
The printing
press was the birth of journalism. The mass production of literature across the
world allowed discussion and debate; and there was now a space to publish it.
This is where “imagined communities” occurred, journalism allowed communication
across physical boundaries (Anderson 1991). It could be said this is where
‘gossip’ was formed, and by gossip I mean the actual discussion of what was
happening in government or higher power, not what your best friend wore last
night. It is interesting to compare coffee houses in the 18th
century to Twitter today, as they act as the same platform.
The printing
press set journalism up as a profession, well, at least up until a few years
ago. If you were a journalist, your article was to be read by everyone, as
there were not multiple publications.
The newspaper
was a primary, and often only, source of news and entertainment for people. The
newspaper may have been printed daily or weekly, and it was a direct connection
to the people, for the people. This
allowed the set up of a business model for newspapers where they could make
profit from advertising revenue (and in that, pay their journalists good
money).
Today, social
media and the Internet have taken that away. Twitter, for example, has a
24-hour news cycle, which is quite literally, impossible for a printing press
to compete with. As a result, advertisers have started withdrawing from print
media and moved to digital platforms such as Twitter where advertising space is
much cheaper and will have a greater reach. Not only is this putting print
media out of business, it is also seeing a decline in the amount of trained
investigative journalists. In Sydney in 1992, the average free-lance journalist
would be paid $1.50 a word for an article in the newspaper. Today, it is
50cents a word (Simmons, 2010)
It is widely
accepted that there are less ‘professional’ journalists and that it is somewhat
of a dead industry. However depending on perception, there are actually more
journalists in a thriving industry.
Pre 1900,
journalism was used strictly as the 4th estate, a watchdog for
society against corruption. Today, that description is would only apply to
‘investigative journalism’, which there is very little of. Recently, everyone
is a ‘journalist’. Twitter users can break news via their status in 140
characters or less and upload a photo if they were at the scene. It’s all about
mobility and urgency. Consequently, the authenticity and legitimacy of the
media and journalists is often questioned.
Twitter has made
journalism, or what we are calling journalism, about speed and frequency.
People are beginning to favour news that is quick and accessible, not a 2 page
article that they have to sit down and take time to read.
There is a
‘pseudo-evolution’ of the mind whereby attention spans are dropping whilst our
ability to absorb quick snippets of information increases (Cooke 2005). The
newly created iPhone app ‘Summly’ created by Nick D’Aloisio is a development of
this idea as it summarises the content of a webpage in to a few words. The
implication of absorbing small amounts of information quickly has further been
developed in televisions, which can display news headlines via voice
recognition. It could be said these implications of media convergence are
making our life increasingly fast pace (Cooke 2005).
Back the
question of perception of journalism, there is a huge rise in the amount of
Internet bloggers on what is known as the ‘blogosphere’. These bloggers, or
journalists to some, write about areas that interest them. They have become
specialised in an area, and usually their followers will be too. For example
there has recently been a huge increase in the amount of nutrition bloggers,
who follow other nutrition bloggers etc. The data friction present actually
helps to make the information credible, thus the bloggers are thriving as they
are attracting advertisers to use their blog. In some ways this could be seen
as better journalism than that of pre 1900, as there are endless options for
the reader in a specialised area.
This is
reflected in a general sense that Twitter and other social media sites are
making journalism more personal and tailor-made for each individual. In the
article ‘Digital Publishing’ by Paul Mercieca; Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos stated
that, “if you have 20 million customers,
you should have 20 million stores” (Mercieca, P 2001,p 77). The printing press
was never able to do this. Journalism pre 1900 was a very ‘one size fits all’
audience.
In an article,
published on the American Public Broadcasting Service website, called “Why
Publishers Are About to Go Data Crazy”, Sachin Kamdar predicts it will become
common practice for newsrooms and editors to “interview the data” before
selecting it for a feature (the data being that from Twitter, and social
media). The question is then raised, why should we even bother writing articles
in the first place, why not just look at the data?
In a lecture by
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, he gives 15 advantages of using
Twitter. One of them, which also applies to journalism today, is that it is
interactive. He says everyone likes to create and write things, why should
journalists be the only ones that get to?
“Reporters use
open media as a way of finding sources, communities and audiences. The notion
of a story – with a finite starting and finishing point – is changing.
Live-blogging can bring audiences of millions around specific events. Linking
allows you to place your journalism at the heart of issues, news and
information.” (Rusbridger 2010)
“Much of what we
call communication is, necessarily, no more in itself, than transmission; that
is to say, a one-way sending” (Williams 1958).
Said over
50-years-ago I think Raymond Williams have summed it up perfectly. Today,
journalism is moving towards communication. Pre 1900, it was transmission.
References:
Anderson, B 1991, Imagined
Communities, Verso, London.
Cooke Lynne
(2005): A visual convergence of print,
television, and the internet: charting 40 years of design change in news
presentation, New Media and Society, 7:1, 27-46
Kamdar, Sachin (2012) ‘Why Publishers are about to go
Data Crazy’, Mediashift: Your Guide to the Digital Revolution, January
17, http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/01/why-publishers-are-about-to-go-data-crazy017.html
Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1979) ‘Defining the initial
shift: some features of print culture’ in The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change Vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 43-163
McLuhan, Marshall (1962) The Gutenberg galaxy:the
making of typographic man, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
McLuhan, M 1962, The
Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 1st ed,
University of Toronto Press.
Rusbridger, A 2010, ‘The
Splintering of the Fourth Estate’, The Guardian, 19 November, accessed 4
June 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/19/open-collaborative-future-journalism/print
Simmons, M 2010,
What Are Freelancers Paid? The Complete Data So Far, Crikey, 28 Februrary, accessed 14th June 2013,
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2010/02/08/what-are-freelancers-paid-the-complete-data-so-far/
No comments:
Post a Comment