Print & Digital & Thought

Corey Pressman on the impact of digital

I came into this series on the impact of digital - and indeed, the impact of print - on thought, on how we engage with the universe and each other as humans - and on our spiritual lives [but more about that in my religion blog].

This particular post looks at the idea of finality - how print required a self-contained, 'this, and not that' view of reality.  A book, or pamphlet or article in a journal has a beginning, a middle, an end.  It is self-contained, an object of and in itself, delineated from other objects.  It can be just black print on white paper in an innocuous font - or as in many early books, an objet d'art - a thing not only complete, but a thing of beauty in its completeness - a cover design, the feel and texture of the paper chosen, perhaps a supple leather binding, interesting fonts within, colours, abstract and realist pictures and later photographs....

What, perhaps, digital publishing/writing [they are the same with the advent of self pub] has done is remove this finality.  A text is never complete - and no longer requires the clumsy artifact of second, third and so on 'editions' - each of which in the non-fiction world require years of revision and are thus already out of date when they appear.  The academic world has not accepted this intrinsic aspect of digital pub/writing as of yet - I was told once by an acquisitions editor for a university press that, they did a few eBooks - by which he meant, they took an out of date version of an academic work and put it into pdf form online.  Yecccchhhh.  [sorry, the best word i could come up with that expressed my opinion of this in one 'complete' expression!].


The 'academic' book I am writing on the relationship between religion and society will be permanently ongoing - well as permanent as there are others to extend, correct, and alter it after I am gone.  I put 'academic' in [what are those thingies called?] because to be called academic, one must be peer-reviewed and printed... and this will have peer criticism I am sure, but will most definitely NOT be printed.

This idea of non-finality is more interesting when you turn to fiction, however.  I am also writing a work of fiction - multimedia, bizarre and unending - call it a novel if you must - which will at some point be up and available, but unfinished.  I hope to keep it going for as long as I am able, and then would hope others would play around with it beyond that point -......