Wednesday, February 5, 2014

The Invisibility of Print

In what sense might we say that the medium of print becomes visible just at the moment it is “superseded” by the internet?

I’m sitting here, trying to find an answer to this question. As I repeat it over and over in my head, I feel as though maybe the medium of print will always be superseded by the internet, thus it never can become visible before it is visible on the internet. Since the invention of the internet, print has become second nature. The internet lessens the distance between the time it takes us to receive information while the medium of print is a much longer process. For example, by the time it takes for newspapers to be printed, the news has already changed and one can already access it on the internet, even as it is happening. I’m not trying to say print has become extinct, but in some aspects it has become invisible.
The only visibility of both mediums is the way they structure our interaction with the world around us. Printed books, for example, have structured how we tell stories spatially and how we read. We have even transferred this structure of storytelling into the digital medium with the idea of ebooks. They still have the same structure as printed books do. I suppose, this is an example of how the medium of print could be seen visible still in the digital world. I guess the bigger question I think we need to think about in terms of these two mediums is what does it do to us(in terms of our interactions with them) and how does it change us?

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