Fighting back against the techno-swarms
Written by Kevin P. Keane
Sunday, 22 November 2009 09:43
G'day !
This article was originally published via the IAPHC's Constant Contact newsletter looked after by Lesley Addy. In the run up to the new IAPHC website, we inadvertently missed posting it to the site. Since it provides grist for a Kevin's Blog post later this week, we re-post it now, and note that it also engendered an intriguing debate on Patrick Henry's always thought provoking "A Printing Office" blog on whattheythink.com:
Fighting back against the techno-swarms
(Original Publish Date 22 Sep 2009)
The best line of Print 09 was uttered in his usual off-handed but acutely insightful manner by Dr Joe Webb at the first Xerox luncheon on September 11. Dr Joe said: "We have a coal fired Internet." Meaning, we should not forget that all those who tout paperless billing via a the Internet or downloading e-books to their Amazon Kindle reader via the Internet are still using one of millions of computer nodes on a worldwide network which is run off of electricity and which by definition leaves a carbon imprint of a considerably sulfurous sort.
Here is the link to the discussion on Pat Henry's Blog:
In the Bully Pulpit
During my remarks as the wrap-up speaker at the Executive Outlook Conference which preceded Print 09 by a day, I observed that our industry (the printing and publishing industry and its relatives in communications) has not done, with a few notable exceptions like The Print Council, much of an effective job of fighting back in a unified and coordinated manner against the drum-beat that print on paper is bad, is not green and is not cool, with-it and wow. Everyone in the industry needs to do better in a fact based manner with the occasional pithy petard like Dr. Joe's Coal Fired Internet observation. Our industry associations, our industry vendors, and in fact every single person who makes a living in the global graphic arts needs to pick up the fallen flag of pride and fight back to validate that what we do has value, and is not implicitly anti-environment.
This Amazon is in Seattle, not Brasilia
IAPHC-Seattle member Milt Vine offered this blurb in his great e-newsletter he sends to clients of his Seattle Bindery business. This is from issue # 248 datelined 28 August 2009:
2. Kindles for Kindling. I was amused by this story in The New Yorker by Nicholson Baker, who has very little use for Amazon's highly touted Kindle 2. In fact, with the exception of the iPod, he has little use for digital readers period. But of the Kindle he complains: "The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn't just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. . .This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon?" It's a long article, but a fun read.Click here.
That other Romano wunderkind
Richard Romano, writing a tour-de-force article in the virtual pages of WhatTheyThink.com recently cited (via a link inside another link) the 2008 Annual Report of Domtar for providing some good, dispassionate factual nuggets.
Here is one from Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove a full professor of French at the University of Toronto:
"If electronic information is that of "real time", printed information is that of long time. At the US Library of Congress, we will find that their best electronic recording device cannot guarantee electronic archives for more than 110 years. After that they begin to degrade."
They still print magazines, don't they?
And so, as if on cue, our printed issue of the September 21, 2009 The New Yorker Magazine arrived in the mail box and we find this comment to the Nicholson Baker article cited by Milt Vine above:
The Mail
Re: A New Page
A letter in response to Nicholson Baker's article (August 3, 2009)
September 21, 2009
A letter in response to Nicholson Baker's article (August 3, 2009)
September 21, 2009
"Nicholson Baker's excellent piece on the Kindle foregrounds a thorny issue in the shift from print to digital media-that of preservation ("A New Page," August 3rd). The entrepreneur Russ Wilcox's comment that "you can save a hundred and thirty billion dollars a year if you move the information digitally" is misleading. In contrast to what's been done in the case of paper, no one has yet ascertained the future costs of preserving electronic books and newspapers over the long term. Even more significant, what the preserved items will look like is unclear, as data formats, computing platforms, and reading devices ceaselessly morph into their next market-driven incarnations. Imagine if the only copy left of "Imaging in Oncology" were the Kindle version, with its garbled tables and lost color coding? Or, a more likely scenario, if several copies of the book existed in different formats, each with a different visual presentation? In each case, the authority and usefulness of the cultural and scientific record would be severely impaired."
Jean-François Blanchette
Assistant Professor
Department of Information Studies
U.C.L.A.
Los Angeles, Calif. Are we, "you and me" Linked In as yet?
IAPHC, The Graphic Professionals Resource Network Group | LinkedIn -
On Tuesday 15 September I posted a useful factual article about the Two Sides Campaign being launched in Europe to "Promote Print and Paper's Great Environmental Story and Power to Communicate."
"-The original wireless communication: Producing and reading a traditional newspaper can consume 20% less energy than reading news online for more than 30 minutes."
The Internet is an amazing tool, and a real friend to communicating quickly and often quite accurately, I mean just think about how many links are embedded in what you just read!
But print on paper retains a place of honour at the table of human discourse, thought-leadership and learning to be a citizen of the world.
Let's not be shy about the power of print.
Kevin Keane
Last Updated on Friday, 26 February 2010 10:34
