In the early 1960s, Marshall McLuhan had forecast various drastic changes in our way of thinking and communicating. One of his intuitions was that we were entering the era of the global village, and many of his predictions have certainly come true in the world of the Internet. But, having examined the influence of printing on the evolution of culture and our own individual sensibility in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan went on, in Understanding Media and other works, to predict the decline of alphabetic linearity and the rise to dominance of the image—in the simplest terms, what the mass media translated as “You no longer read. You watch television or the strobe images in a nightclub.”
McLuhan died in 1980, when personal computers were being introduced into everyday life. The first models made little more than an experimental appearance in the late 1970s, but the mass market opened up in 1981 with IBM computers, and if he’d lived a few more years, he’d have had to admit that, in a world apparently dominated by the image, a new alphabetic culture was establishing itself. You can’t do much with a personal computer unless you can read and write. It’s true that young children can use an iPad these days even at preschool age, but all the information we receive via the Web, emails, and text messages is based on alphabetic knowledge. The computer fulfilled what had been predicted in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Archdeacon Frollo, who pointed first to a printed book, then to the cathedral decorated with images and other symbols that could be seen through the window, and said: “This will kill that.” The computer has shown itself to be a global instrument with its multimedia links, and is capable also of bringing to life “that” image of the Gothic cathedral, but it is based fundamentally on principles that postdate The Gutenberg Galaxy.
With a return to the written word, the invention of e-books has also meant that texts can be read on a screen rather than on a printed page, prompting new forecasts about the disappearance of books and newspapers, suggested in part by a decline in sales. Every hack journalist’s favorite sport for years has been to ask writers how they view the disappearance of printed paper. And it’s not enough to claim that the book is still vitally important for moving and storing information, that we have scientific evidence that books printed five hundred years ago have survived remarkably well, whereas we have no scientific evidence to show that magnetic media currently in use can survive more than ten years, nor can we find out, given that today’s computers can no longer read a 1980s floppy disk.
But the newspapers are now reporting disturbing developments whose significance and consequences we have yet to understand. Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, recently bought the Washington Post, and while the decline of the printed newspaper has been proclaimed, Warren Buffett recently acquired sixty-three local papers. As Federico Rampini observed in La Repubblica, Buffett is a giant of the old economy, and no innovator, but he has a rare acumen for investment opportunities. And other Silicon Valley wheeler-dealers appear to be moving into the newspaper trade.
Rampini wonders whether Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg might inflict the final blow by buying the New York Times. Even if this doesn’t happen, it’s clear that the digital world is rediscovering paper. Is all this commercial calculation, or political speculation, or a desire to preserve the press as a bastion of democracy? I don’t feel I can yet attempt any interpretation of what’s happening. But I think it’s interesting that we are witnessing another reversal of prophecies. Perhaps Mao was wrong: beware of paper tigers.
2013