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November 14, 2008
The death of print and a home out in the wind
For a long while I—maybe we—have been pondering, working, and analyzing the universal aspects of Web 2.0. (Are we at 2.1 yet?) And it is truly an invigorating reality that social communities can and do develop online to maintain an oppositional, contemplative, progressive, cohesive culture that is unlimited by space.
Of course, I’ve thought, too, that this development will extend the life of non-mainstream “publishing.” Though what “publishing” is when it no longer means “to make public” I can’t yet see.
Still, all of this connection has seemed like promise. When the internet evolved from being center oriented—all links pointing to Amazon.com, Microsoft, B&N—into an actual complex web of two-way connections, it seemed that real conversation would continue; it seemed that being online would not necessarily be isolating. It still seems that way— A confession: I’ve accidentally begun to Twitter, though it strikes me time and again that my voice must grate out (or in) there—I’m probably the wrong age, my thoughts all the wrong timbre.
Anyway, all that ethereal connectedness does sound good. But recently I’ve begun wondering about a correlative state of affairs. The current discussion of The Death of Print is, in part, what caused this thinking—and it’s accrued not in the context of book publishing.
What I’m wondering is what the local effect will be if newspapers and local magazines disappear. If the irresistible pressure of the internet is outward to the world, will the online versions of those publications be able to maintain their emphasis, not only on local news and local socio-political specifics, but on local flavor?
It’s long been unsettling to find the same chain restaurants at every exit on the Interstate—first fast-food, then the Texas Roadhouses and Olive Gardens. Always unsettling to realize that the food you can get in small-town USA is not often specific to . . . well, to anyplace. (Taos and Santa Fe notwithstanding.) But now it seems that was only the analog beginning of things. How much farther from home do we get if we do not open the local paper every day and check the police reports, the obituaries, the social pages, the church announcements? My father read The Trinity Standard for his entire life, though he left that little town behind the Pine Curtain sometime around 1939. His reading that tiny paper meant something to him then, something about connectedness, something about home. Could it still mean something to us?
In short, whence a real sense of place—so rich a force in literature and in all the other arts, so rich a part of life—when so many of our business, political and now social connections are now placeless?
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