Michael Josefowicz at the Mediashift blog has a piece on what is now called the “Printernet.” Need one say more?
Josefowicz is pretty into the idea of print/digital synergy, which on one level is a great way of debunking the replacement theory of media (the “this will kill that” school invented by Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris). Anyone who fell for the “paperless office” gag a while back should have already thought of this.
What we need to do more of though is ask ourselves what would it mean to write for things like the printernet. Earlier I mentioned (see Out Book the Book) that we ought to be thinking through the communicative protocols appropriate to different communications media (stop writing books for digital platforms and write digital interfaces for digital platforms…).
But Josefowicz’s argument gives us a new media hybrid space to think through. It’s not books or newspapers, but it’s also not blogs or facebook. One of the conundrums is the way the printernet and other intermedial hybrids are a mixture of opposing principles — mass personalization, Josefowicz calls it. At first glance this makes little sense, but the more you think about it the more it offers interesting opportunities to think about “versions” instead of “copies.” It puts an emphasis on audience- and time-specific writing within a more universal template. The funny thing is, this is what academics do all the time — when their material moves from conference paper to journal article to book chapter and back to conference paper…
There is a delightful moment in Goethe’s The Man of 50 where the man of fifty enters into the beautiful widow’s salon and she tells him she was just having a debate with a friend about whether anyone can make a work of art without some audience in mind. Josefowicz’s point, I think, is a continuation of Goethe’s thought experiment. The older courtly model of occasional poetry — that all art was performance for a specific audience in time — was radically giving way to the growing disassociation between art, audience, and time. Goethe and writers like him were wrestling with what it meant to write for people one did not know and for ages that were not contemporary with one’s present.
The printernet idea, it seems to me, is a way of combining these two models of creativity that presuppose two different ideas of audience and anonymity. Rather than write one thing once for who knows whom, or one thing once for those directly in front of us, our “writing” would be the summation of multiple versions delivered at multiple times in different forms to different audiences. But these “versions” would not be reducible to their contingent parts — all conceived as occasional poems — but work together to build some larger whole. This is the argument I make in my book about Goethe (see “The Work as Network” in Dreaming in Books) — that he was trying to think through a new notion of the “work” as consisting of a summation of discrete versions. Writing conceived in this way both micro-izes the mass audience into audienceS and macro-izes the occasionality of the courtly poem (or academic paper) performed for one’s immediate peers (all 6.5 of them!).
As academic writers we are a long way from this — we are stuck in a book only or journal only paradigm and have not yet contended with the range of new writing interfaces out there and how they impact scholarly work. Nor have we thought through how we might join all these parts together into larger media wholes. The old model was the book of essays. How is the book no longer the scholarly summa but now part of something more?
Perhaps one way to start is to resurrect the history of what I have been lately calling our “versional modernity,” a tradition of writers and thinkers contending with this interaction between the occasional and the timeless, rewriting and archivization. From there we can begin to conceptualize new hybrid models of “the work” for media-technological spaces like the printernet.
Thank you for picking this up.
To be clear I make no pretensions to have “invented’ the term printernet. But it is fascinating to see that the word appeared completely independently as the marketing slogan for a print trade show being held in Australia on May 26. It is also the subject of an article- still trapped on Paper in Australia, but soon to be posted on the net for wider distribution.
Given your post and what I have found as the usefulness of the related concepts to simplify the complexity of the processes of print and internet, it may turn out to be a useful thought model. Only time will tell.
I’m coming at the problem from the point of view of the commercial printing industry. Before retiring I spent 30 years producing and selling print product for some of the leading edge graphic designers in NYC during 1980 – 1990. Then 7 years teaching production to graphic design students at Parsons School of Design. Whatever I think I’ve learned about the process of reading and designing for print, I’ve picked up from that experience.
My professional passion is fixing the bottom of the pyramid high school education problem. I think I’m seeing that a printernet can play a significant role. The blog I use to talk and think about the printing industry directly is called Tough Love For Xerox. Although it is printer centric with lots of acronyms, buzzwords and the appropriate mix of snarky comments, maybe some of your visitors would find it interesting to stop by. It would be great to get a completely different voice on the radar of my visitors over there.
Thanks Michael for your reply. I enjoy following your work as it gives us a nice new way of getting out of the end of the book paradigm. Your work has really gotten me thinking about modes of academic writing that are stuck in such either/or models. But still a long way off from having a concrete plan. See my post on my students’ difficulty with their end of the semester hypertext projects to get an idea just how far away we are from digital literacy, let alone paper literacy.
Andrew,
I look forward to continuing our discussion. At my Print in the Communication Ecology blog , I’ve tried to translate some of my words developed in the commercial print world to your words, as I understand them.
I was especially taken by your phrase “time-specific writing”. I changed slightly to space/time specific writing to , I think good effect.
As for the literacy problem. I’ve confronted the same problem both in the worlds of College education of graphic designers and at the bottom of the pyramid inner city high schools in New York City. My working hypothesis is that basic problem is the same and goes past the definations of media or paper literacy to the questions of literacy in general and speicifically logical thinking.
My contention is that type and pictures (graphs, mathematical symbols) are the best tools to learn logical thinking. The other media are essentially conversational media, that is not constrained by the unnatural structures of logical thought.