Now we are digital ~ plus ça change

There is no doubt about it - a paradigm shift is occurring in the way we see our news and media presented. This change, of course, is all due to the internet. It all seems rather sudden though, doesn’t it? Think back to New Year’s Eve 1999 – there was more concern about whether the internet was going to somehow spontaneously implode, also destroying life as we then knew it. Y2K the geeks called it – gee, didn’t they clean up? (I suppose it was a form of karmic justice really).

But just over a decade hence, look at us now! For example, I feel very inadequate for being one of the few people in my workplace who doesn’t have anything akin to an iPhone. Sorry, but I just do not feel the need to either facebook (lower case deliberate) or check my emails every five minutes. Someone very wisely once called the telephone the Devil’s invention – are we now living in a Hell of our own making? One can only wonder what Milton might make of this current state of affairs: ‘Paradise Almost Found, But Then Stuffed Up, Because Everyone Got Greedy (as usual)’ perhaps?

Gosh, somehow I’ve uncharacteristically gone of on a divergent rant – how unlike me. Anyhow, all I wanted to talk about was the different design and layout demands of print v online media, and how this may affect anyone in the writing/editing/publishing world.

I for one will be saddened by the passing of Times New Roman, and all of its sibling and extended family of serif fonts – for this was what I was weaned on. The internet has no place for the serif.

I read an academic article recently by Gunther Kress. He is by all accounts something of an ‘expert’ on these matters. In this article he posits the notion that it is more the social and political forces, rather than the medium, which engender such change (as above). But I would beg to differ. It’s kind of like arguing that the Gutenberg press was not a harbinger of huge social change, and surely the internet is today’s equivalent? As I think I have mentioned in another post, were the first scratchings on a cave wall not the forebear of today's blogs? It's not, therefore, social and political change, it's just that the medium is different.

Sorry, Gunther, I am certainly no expert, but I would urge you to do some serious research into the field of anthropology, and especially semiotics – maybe start with the structuralists (Levi-Strauss perhaps), and then post-structuralists like Bourdieu and Foucault. Of course this may entail reading actual books...good luck with that.

Reference: Kress, G 1997, ‘Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically mediated communication: the potentials of new forms of text’ in Page to screen : taking literacy into the electronic era, ed. I Snyder, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, NSW.

Image source