I recently spoke to my friend Colin Horgan about the CUL for a True/Slant article he was writing, and the conversation turned, as conversations often do, to the practical and metaphysical questions raised by the differences between online and print media.
Specifically, what happens to literature as part of an ever-changing community landscape when it becomes, via the web, geographically non-specific? How does this affect an organization like the CUL, whose mission is “to map the evolution (historically and contemporaneously) of Chicago’s communities and movements and encourage the production of new media by providing context, inspiration, and programming designed to support collaboration?” The internet provides a convenient, free-or-cheap alternative to zine making, book making, and small-press printing in the form of blogging. The blog or website format offers not only a more economical, environmentally-friendly, and widely-distributed option for publications which, in the pre- or proto-internet era, would have naturally utilized the print medium, but also some other features as well: with blogging, there’s very little time commitment required. You don’t have to think about layout, format, how you’re going to duplicate and distribute your product–you just type whatever you want in the box, and hit “publish!”
As a result, there are jillions of bloggers globally disseminating their thoughts on any and everything who would never have bothered with print, some with and some without connections to literary and cultural communities in their region. It seems to me, at least, that now, with print no longer the default method for information dissemination, a person or group that chooses the print medium often does so consciously, choosing it over the benefits of the online medium for very specific reasons. Of course, the tactile experience of holding something as you read it is most often cited, but there are tons of other practical and aesthetic reasons. If you specifically want to reach a small, location-specific population of readers–bike riders in the Logan Square area, for example–it makes sense to print a very small run and make it available at the places where that population goes every day–bike shops; cafes, stores, and bars in Logan Square that always have a bunch of bikes out front.
In my conversation with Colin, I wondered if, specifically regarding zine-making versus blogging, the decision to publish in print might hinge on connections with visual art, in which the process of creating an object and the object’s orientation to its viewer and environment are essential elements in its total content. For this reason, I don’t think people will ever stop producing independent publications, but what’s represented in them has changed A LOT because of these new questions. If you don’t need a physical object to represent any part of your content, well, then, you’re probably going to be blogging and not book-making…. but then….
If the reasons to print are changing, how accurate of a picture are we getting of location-specific identities, culture, and communities from what’s still being printed? How do libraries, both independent and institutional, approach the systematic archiving of material that is ephemeral by nature? And most importantly, how are all people as consumers of information affected as the question of information dissemination becomes more and more metaphysical?
The “Death of Print” subject has been and continues to be discussed, examined, debated, deconstructed, reconstructed, and otherwise addressed in many different ways by many different people in many different places. Our conversation here, like the topic itself, is already venturing into “meta” territory, carried out as it is on the online blog of a community organization that archives geographically-specific independent and small press paper media. This series will highlight some of the ways people have responded to the question across different disciplines.
–MEREDITH
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