The Co-operation of Print and Digital
It has been well known for a while now that the face of media as we know it is changing. We are seeing a transition from print to digital, which is questioning the existence of newspapers, books, magazines and mediums alike.
But will this really ever happen? I find myself skeptical.
Instead, I tend to lean towards what Deleuze and Guattari described as the ‘machinic phylum’. This theory “provides a way of thinking through how elements of complex medial systems “cooperate” to produce something more than the sum of their parts.. finding ways to conceptualize and use the interplay between such states, rather than reduce them to two grand isolates” (Fuller, 2005, p. 6).
As I look around and study our existing media ecology, I notice not a transition from digital to print, but a cooperation of the two. I start to see how the two are complimenting each other, combining to create a whole new landscape in between, where print and digital are actually working together to create a whole new powerful form of media.
Think of QR codes placed in advertisements and product packaging, online previews of books and magazines which require you to buy the hard copy to see the full text; textbooks with interactive CDs and hybrid books. They all connect print and digital, and their combination makes them arguably more powerful than individually, by giving that little bit of extra information that only one cannot provide. It creates a whole new world of media, where Nick Ruffilo explans, something called metadata can not only change the interaction between media and consumer, but also save the print world.
I guess two is always better than one.
Bibliography
Fuller, Matthew (2005) ‘Introduction: Media Ecologies’ in Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture Cambridge, MA; MIT Press: 1-12
‘Hybrid Books’, Melville House Publishing <http://www.mhpbooks.com/about/hybrid-books/?id=613>
Ruffilo, Nick (2010) ‘Metadata, Not E-Books, Can Save Publishing…’, O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference <http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/07/metadata-not-e-books-can-save.html>
Lecture word- machinic