[column]If the publishing industry is actually in its death throes, then what a remarkably short life it lived. If you were to compress all of human history into a single day, the publishing industry would emerge at 11:59 pm. Although the economic realities tied to the demise of an industry that employs millions of people should not be ignored, all we are losing—if we are losing anything at all—is a very specific, particularly modern, form of communication. Taking the long view, text-on-paper is the oddity, not the norm. So where the death of print is concerned, remember: Nothing lasts forever, especially in the media business. Think of the phonograph, the 8-track tape, the illuminated manuscript.

The publishing industry may, in fact, live on, especially if we allow that the future industry will only loosely resemble the present. Looking back, the unifying thread for the publishing industry over the last 200 years is that it has been relentlessly one-way. This is worth considering. For most of human history, what we think of as media content—from stories around a campfire to making music—has been overwhelmingly participatory and reciprocal. In the history of human communication, modern media are a historical anomaly, a 200-year blip. Only in that 200-year bubble does it make sense to define media as something created by a class of professionals to [/column] [column]be broadcast to the masses for their passive consumption. What is notable is not that an industry built on a relentless torrent of one-way communication should falter—it’s that it ever existed on such a scale in the first place.

Think about how any medium changes. New media tends to ape the characteristics of already existing media. The first books ever published looked like manuscripts. Why else do websites have “pages”? All media, no matter how short lived, exist in relation to one another, respond to one another, and are therefore profoundly interconnected. The device we call a television was in fact an enhanced radio during its formative period. Although television is now our dominant mode of entertainment while radio listening has been relegated to our cars, both of these media were shaped by a yearning for more immediate, intimate information. As such, they share common characteristics. Television, radio, books, and so on are all man-made cultural products as much as they are physical objects. Thanks to them, we have come to think of media as the physical object rather than the content it contains, the manufacturing rather than the communication.

Media theorist Paul Duguid warns of two flawed assumptions about modern media. The first is that each new medium eliminates or [/column]

[column]subsumes its predecessor. This would mean that digital technology spells the doom of print, but as with television and radio, the rise of a new medium need not mean the death of another. The second is the assumption that each subsequent medium improves on its predecessor. Although the telephone, for instance, allows for a more nuanced, textured exchange of information than did the telegraph, there is more to understanding a particular medium than functionality. You cannot assess a medium merely based on the accuracy and amount of information conveyed. A well-written newspaper article provides more than raw information that can be found lots of places. Newspapers help us organize our world in a coherent way and bring us a multitude of perspectives everyday that we might not otherwise encounter.

If printed text ultimately becomes a relic, whether or not this constitutes a tragic loss will be a matter of debate, but it’s not hard to imagine the two sides falling along generational lines. No doubt, some people lost something important along with the telegraph: telegraph operators perhaps, or Morse code enthusiasts.

But their children probably viewed the telegraph as antiquated and cumbersome, preferring to talk on the telephone. Looking past the [/column] [column]economics, the anxiety over losing the publishing industry is, at its root, not about the publishing industry at all. Rather, the anxiety is over losing the familiar cultural touchstones—the trusted daily paper, books as authoritative sources, publication as a validation of the information’s worth—that made the publishing industry relevant and vital. Understood that way, the problems the industry faces look less like self-inflicted wounds (though there are a few, to be sure) and more like inevitabilities. Cultures change and cultural practices—including media—change right along with them.

It’s fairly certain that those currently in charge of the industry won’t shape its future as much as they might want. The devices, social practices and forms that constitute media emerge from the ground up. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he wanted people to say “Ahoy!” when they answered a call. Inventors never succeed in dictating the terms of an invention’s use. So as the publishing industry moves away from what it’s been and inches toward what it might become, a picture of the future probably lies more at the periphery. At the edges there is no pressure to hold up the middle, no investment in the status quo; if transformational change is going to come from anywhere, it’s going to come from there. [/column]