Caught a glimpse of the Space Shuttle Endeavour as it flew very close to my house today. The clip is quite short – but I was able to catch a few nice frames. Sometimes, history comes to you.
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Some smart guy once said that “familiarity is the breeding ground of all contempt for the law.” Maybe it was Machiavelli. I believe that it also follows that familiarity breeds contempt for civility and social order; courtesy and honor. In our short lifetimes, we have seen people traverse a vast behavioral spectrum – from a time when some behavior would be totally shunned to a time when some infractions are not only accepted but wholly embraced. Take my dilemma with plagiarism as an example.
My material has been online for more than a decade. I am widely plagiarized. In a way, I take a certain pride in the number of times people have copied my articles and my book, “The Art of Jack Kirby.” Rather than indignant, I feel relevant. I belong to the streaming conversation that fuels the Internet. I am not only a participant of its fabric; in some very real ways, I am a component and this pleases me.
Does this in any way excuse overt plagiarism? No. Anyone who – for example – publishes a book that is a wholesale ripoff of another work should burn in hell. But what if someone cuts the corners a little to borrow a bit here and there? What’s a paragraph or two between colleagues? Before the Internet, I’d say, “plagiarism is stealing! plagiarism is a crime.” Okay. Let’s run with that.
Remember from Philosophy 101, that all ethics and morality arise from society’s awareness of the conditions of mutually accepted behavior. Call it the “social contract of what’s cool.” For example, in one community, the manner of “borrowing” may be called “stealing” in another. In some places, people might just as well shoot you for “borrowing” without asking. In another, they might be downright surprised that you asked. Buddha claimed that ownership was one of the keys of suffering. Psalm 112:5 says, “Good will come to him who is generous and lends freely…”
Well, I’m a pretty charitable guy, but is there a difference between borrowing a bike and “borrowing” intellectual property? What do we do if the plagiarizer will not/does not credit the original author, what then do we do? Is it really a crime, if so – to what degree? Should we go to any expense to rectify every case? As a good friend once said, “It all depends on how pissed off you are and how much money you are willing to throw at a lawsuit.”
Post-internet and now elder didactic, I chose to feel gratitude when a peer finds my work important enough to include in their own. I chose to ‘chill’ and hope that people see beyond their own selfish needs and give credit where credit is due.
Still, I’m no Buddha. I admit feeling that jolt of insult and hurt whenever I see that someone has carted off with my work without so much as a ‘howdy.’ Moreover, it is saddening to see such pervasive – brazen – acts of stealing. And let’s be honest, business competitors do it to each other even more often than do bloggers and college students.
Philosophers observe that perceived public reaction is the seed to what eventually becomes morally and ethically acceptable behavior. Follow that line of thinking and you see that it is society’s malleable reaction that then becomes the attenuator for changes in what we accept as normal. Could it be then that the prevalence of plagiarism is merely the hemline of the present culture of “good enough”? Has our lackadaisical reaction to ‘stealing’ made us complicit in the lackadaisical observation of stealing?
I have no answers. There is no clear solution save calling my attorney every time I feel slighted – and frankly, I don’t want to live like a nervous hen. So, here I sit at the junction between insult and pride – bad news, I am plagiarized; good news, I am plagiarized. -HP
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You get what you pay for…
That’s what the old guy said. Bob Frost – recently plucked from the blog-o-sphere (he lost his website, which was a damn shame, IMO). Old school too. Very old. His favorite class: Latin.
I met Bob just before I fell into (his words) the “evil pit”; aka “marketing communications.” That was a gazillion years ago at Cal State Fullerton. He taught classical literature and Latin to children of spoiled university brats – “sic semper tyrannis,” he says. I was one of those brats, I suppose.
We keep touch so that he can jabber at me in that dead language. He says that the only other purpose it serves is helping attorneys make their “sorcery” as impenetrable as possible - deus ex machina. And, he adds with an added slice of cynicism, ”Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur.” Trans: everything sounds more impressive when said in Latin. Consensio? LOL!
Here’s a new Latin invention that ought to make Bob curl up in his grave (when he gets there): Accipio pro pensus: or in the custom of the vulgar dialect: “you get what you paid for.”
I was thinking about so-called social media marketing (SMM) “experts” alongside another oversold tagline: search engine optimization (SEO) “experts.”
Maybe I’m just mirroring Bob’s cynicism. To be fair, I am a public relations practitioner (full disclosure) and naturally there is bias. But the truth is, if you haven’t noticed, we tend to create new eMarketing models for just about every pop trend that happens along. Now we need specialty eProfessions? eGod.
We didn’t start thinking about optimizing our sites for search engines until shortly after 1997 and the term itself didn’t take hold until around 2000. I was actually rooting for the more accurate “search engine results management.” Then social media stormed at us between 2003 and 2007, and with it, the conundrum over what to do with swelling audiences on Twitter, Facebook, et cetera. Schools like San Francisco State University now offer a certificate in social media marketing. A year ago, somebody posted this article on Technorati expounding the virtues of other colleges offering much the same. All well and good – but haven’t we been here before? Underneath the fashionable accouterments of this dot com and that, aren’t we merely communicating with our target publics?
Where I take exception to the current trend is when “experts” swarm around the new terminology like smelt during spawning season. Remember the previous confabulation when people blustered about the need for “desktop publishing experts” and really what they wanted was somebody well versed in graphic production and publishing? Remember the mad dash to grow “Webmasters”? My only surprise is that somebody didn’t try to formalize ‘TechnoGuru’ into a degreed profession.
This is probably what sent networking maven, Peter Shankman (www.shankman.com) over the edge with this gem:
Being an expert in Social Media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge.
Jargon – no matter how clever or trendy – do not master the art that they were intended to serve. I have no problem with people learning and working all things SEO and SMM. I have no problem if somebody does a lot of that kind of work. But when we surrender to the ‘mystery’ of the tech and allow the jargon to define the art, that’s when we lose vital perspective on the true task at hand. These new terms ought to be treated as functions in a total public relations and marketing communications strategy. They should be integrated into a total plan that includes research, planning, implementation and evaluation. Moreover, they need to be weighed along with all marketing functions for BOTH ROI’s – (relevance, originality, impact AND return on investment!). Capisce?
Now then. Caveat emptor: let the buyer beware! -HP
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As I read the stories of Japan’s post March 11 earthquake and tsunami survivors, the ache in my heart grows and carves a very large hole in my soul.
Japan is my second home country. My mother was born there. I lived there for most of my childhood. Although I do not speak Japanese fluently, I dream in Japanese (that’s a weird one, isn’t it?). So when read accounts of this disaster, I easily see it from the Japanese view.
My ache is for the parents. I don’t know what I would do were I in this situation. I cannot fathom how a surviving parent can conjure the strength to say to himself, “I must carry on.” What would I do if my whole family died in a single catastrophic moment? Could God carry me? Would my inner spirit be enough?
And yet… it seems that most Japanese are girding themselves for quiet mourning even as their longing burns. I expect they will manage to find the strength and carry on, despite their own doubts. I predict they will accomplish what I cannot imagine.
In Japan, parents try to go on: ‘My child should come home to me’ – CNN.com
I found that I looked for my own coping mechanisms when my own kids asked me about this disaster. It was so easy stick to the physics of earthquakes, the nature of fault lines, water displacement, tsunamis. After the impromptu class, deep sorrow imagining how I would feel if by some terrible fate, my children were suddenly taken from me in the same way.
Would I want to survive? Could I endure the day? I wonder.
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Back in September of last year, I attempted a review of Jose Ortega‘s seminal book La rebelión de las masas, translated The Revolt of the Masses, written during the naïve interval between the World Wars – truly the most tender of our years.
Masses was written as a reaction to the rise of the fascistic and nationalistic tyrannies of pre-WWII. Ortega categorically slams fascism as the tyranny of the bourgeois – a thuggish and violent pretense to history and heritage. But in defining the social phenomenon he describes as ‘mass man‘, Ortega admits that such tyranny is also found among socialists and communists. Mass Man is pervasive.
Mass Man is an equal opportunity destroyer. Mass Man is both parent and preserver of the illusion of purity. I found this quote from an anonymous Amazon reviewer that puts a bull’s eye on a key aspect of Ortega’s Mass Man dynamic:
Mass man is a principal character of the modern superstate; an inert, unthinking being hostile to the finer creations of aristocratic culture and easy prey for demagogues of every political persuasion. He is characterized by passivity, an appetite for entertainment and spectacles, and a hostility toward the sensitivity, discipline and training that are necessary prerequisites to aristocratic culture.
What strikes me is the way Ortega defines the ignorance and profound ineptitude of Mass Man. A film quote from Men in Black comes to mind:
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals…
As Ortega describes it, this dangerous animal is in constant struggle to come to terms with the next “modern world” and blinded by non-stop bewilderment of never ending levels of socio-economic complexity. We are most certainly aware of this struggle, and instinctively we know how dangerous Mass Man truly is. And we appease this creature in tides of de-constructionism, de-historicizing, de-genderizing, de-humanizing – we call it “political correctness” for short. It is one of the greatest social engineering projects ever undertaken. To quiet mass man, to ease his pain, we are willing to strangle every shred of uniqueness from our culture. We fear what he can do so much that we will straighten all paths and clear all stumble stones so that he never stubs his toe.
If you are uncomfortable with that interpretation, consider Ortega’s blunt description of the psychological and sociological constructs; how he describes social transitions from extremes of public order to disorder and his grasp of the latent impetus that Mass Man has for extremist politics. Were Ortega here with us now, he might write about the new uncertain age – one that could unify our energies toward something transformational (like world peace) or set us blundering into yet another epoch of tragic waste.
That leads me to what I believe is Ortega’s most chilling vision: Mass Man as a kinetic object manipulated by politicians and other de facto ‘rulers’ (think “corporations” and “special interests”). Here is where the ontological question of “plentitude” enters the discussion. Ortega categorizes plentitude in several ways: in terms of technology, humanity, moral sense, reality and of practical aspects of daily life like water, energy, well-stocked grocery stores, and so forth. Now imagine a decline of plentitude – either artificial or real – and the struggles that will follow.
We witnessed the power of those kinetics in the so-called Arab Spring; how, after years being denied various forms of plentitude, Mass Man rose up and swept aside the former rulers of Egypt, Yemen, Libya (and soon to be Syria). In some cases (Kaddafi’s Libya), I believe the kinetics were triggered accidentally by pure blundering. In other cases (Mubarak’s Egypt), there is evidence of deliberate manipulation. There are governments – the autocratic ones in particular – that are in clear danger . China, for one, may have the kinetics and the plentitude factors in place to make a spectacular fall.
You’ll find plenty of opinion on how Ortega somehow foretells the fall of western civilization - but Ortega’s visions are based on philosophical observation, not empirical evidence. His lessons are, on the first order, warnings to the aristocracies of the day. He envisioned profound change – and he was right. However any extrapolation beyond historical application – to say that he foretells the fall of all governments, for example – is a rush to judgment and a stretch of logic (at best). To be sure, there are warnings for today’s governments – present and future, democratic and autocratic – but does Ortega have the power to peer through the thick fog of time and circumstance, which grows thicker with every passing day, and predict our future with any kind of accuracy? He is a great philosopher from his time – but he is not a futurist, not a soothsayer or a prophet.
We are enduring some tough times these days, but American society is not so fragile as to tumble into a Mass Man situation that easily. The same goes for most of the established industrialized nations. We may tease the kinetics a bit, but most countries tend to give Mass Man plenty of room to blow off his frustrations. From time to time, he may even riot or burn down a neighborhood, but are these separate acts rage the opening measures of rebellion? Were that the case, then rebellions would be far far more frequent.
Ortega offers us a picture of our human condition based on some pretty subjective observations – one might even say, Euro-centric. I chose to use his observations to gain a clearer vision of how I fit into this whole mess – after all, Mass Man exists wherever we live, and WE have control. -HP
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I just watched the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, directed by Stanley Kramer based on a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee. The story is the fictionalization of the 1925 “Scopes monkey trial” that pitted Darwin’s Theory of Evolution against The Bible. The final scene was the payoff for James Strickling.
In that scene, Spencer Tracy, playing the attorney who defended the teacher jailed for teaching evolution to his students, picked up Darwin’s book in one hand and picked up The Bible in the other. A moment pause, he held them out as though to weigh them. Then he slapped both books together and slipped them into his briefcase.
“The point the authors were trying to make is that science and faith do not have to be mutually exclusive for those who value both,” said Strickling, author of a book I recently read entitled Man and His Planet.
As far as reads go, it’s actually better than most in this category. The refreshing part is that Strickling spends more time with his pure philosophical view than with point-on-point biblical references.
“I don’t believe that scientists should try to use science to invalidate faith for those who believe, and neither should believers use faith to cancel out science. If you study both closely enough, you’ll discover like I did that there are elements of both that actually support the other,” he says. “Both Darwinists and Creationists treat their points of view as dogma, which is not to be conjoined with any other belief system.”
Strickling’s challenge is relevant to logical and rational discussion. Darwinists and Creationists need to lower their guards just long enough to see that Darwinism and evolution are not the same thing and Creationism is not necessarily biblical.
Unfortunately, Strickling can’t resist rolling out “proof” that Biblical dogma actually supports his own; ‘ad hoc’ apologetics and tiresome contradictions. Nevertheless, I applaud his effort and on the main thrust of his argument that one must read with an open mind. When you do, you will find that the Bible appears to compliment many aspects scientific theory. For instance, I have always found that description of God’s creation of the universe and the generally accepted theory of “big bang” appear to describe the same event. But there I go with my own quasi-science, quasi-theological theory.
I most certainly agree with Strickling that there ought to be more acceptance on both sides of the ‘creation’ discussion, if only to defuse the controversy and allow people to accept faith and science on their separate terms. There is no more need to demonize science than there is to impugn God or faith. And we certainly do not need more “objective interpretation” – that just sounds like more deconstructionism.
Faith stands on its own merit and Jesus Christ doesn’t need validation from an imaginative philosophers armed with new revelations. As I tell my Sunday School kids, God has reason enough for all things; Darwin can take care of himself. -HP
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I have an unquenchable thirst for sociographs – especially for any insight on communications, how we communicate, why we bother and (moreover) to what end. Sometimes my journey for information takes me on some pretty wide meanders (read “over thinking”) like John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Thomas More Utopia, J.B. Phillips’ Your God is too Small, Gertrude Himmelfarb On Looking into the Abyss. Some of these books in my collection are well worn. Others I have read once, ponder at a distance where I can hide my bewilderment (O-o, my secret is out).
The ones that really catch my attention scare the crap out of me; the scarier the better. It’s more fun than any horror story or vampire flick because this stuff isn’t fantasy – it’s real. Here’s one, La rebelión de las masas, translated The Revolt of the Masses, written by Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). I was first introduced to Masses when I was a smartass teen filled with faulty ideology and stumbling through my first college classes. There I met Dr. Cohen who insisted that I read the book – in his words – “as a primer for the rest of your life.” I cringed then and after a very long ponder – about 30-odd years – and a reread of the book, I laughed because he was so very right.
Masses is primarily a discussion about the volatility of large disaffected populace and the pressure they exert on governance and society as a whole. Among his prominent themes is the pervasiveness of mediocrity – not necessarily as an artifact of social order but as an equalizer within the socio-political context.
Ortega is sometimes accused of being a bit of an elitist, especially in the context of his definition of “mass thinking”: a system of social order that is openly opposed to excellence and inclined toward conformity; a force that seeks the maintenance of the status quo by relegating original thinking as wrong minded and dangerous to the best interests of the average person. He was one of the intellectual leaders of the pre-WWII Spanish Republican government; a promoter of anti-fascist/totalitarian thinking; and in contrast with today’s struggles, the consequences of our present economics or the emerging trends in social dynamics between the classes, Ortega is spot on.
His observations are just as applicable to 21st century America as they were to Europe during the hopeful years between the World Wars. Although I am troubled by the way he mocks rationality as a virtue and trivializes Utopian aspirations and appears to say to us, “Not in this time; not while the barbarian holds the reigns of control,” he successfully codifies the masses as a quality, not just quantity. It is clear to me that one of his purposes is to warn government of the dangers of rule by “direct action.” In the context of authoritarian leaders, “rule by the sword, die by the sword” says Ortega. When direct action is employed, it often satisfies the hermetic rationale of mass thinking and quickly transform into a weapon of “unreasoned reasoning” that tends to burn everything in its path.
That’s where Ortega lights up my imagination. Mediocrity is a blight that festers in our culture as inertia and often erupts with great ugly consequence. Governance is incapable of overcoming that kind inertia, especially when it has no means to encourage the masses to better themselves through education and the arts (for instance). Left to their own devices, the masses become too self-absorbed for self-reflection and would rather while away their nights watching television. “Mass man” (to use the genderized label)is basically lazy, a mere couch potato who is inwardly happy with his obscurity and outwardly jealous of accomplishment. Anything that will take him away from his well-upholstered comfort is a danger to society and therefore a menace to the common good.
In Ortega’s thinking, this is why original ideas, meritorious achievement, the rich, the intellectual, and the avant garde are always the first victims of revolutions.
Now, doesn’t that just scare the crap right out of you? More later. - HP
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I don’t know how many journalists I have met who have said, “I’m working on a novel,” but I know that it is quite a few. Maybe it’s like being a waiter who aspires to be screenwriter. Some occupations just blend like that.
Maybe a journalist is closer to a novelist than a waiter is to a screenwriter – but maybe not. The similarity between a novel and a feature article is about as far apart as a machine tool to a metal sculpture. All things being equal, a waiter has an interesting advantage over a journalist. Think of the aspiring storyteller who relishes the input of different voices, personalities and mannerisms.
Journalists – well, we can write some great narratives and we’re no slouches when it comes to sizing up those voices, personalities and mannerism. We certainly know what it feels like to pound down a thousand words in an hour. But in my opinion, we also carry within ourselves our greatest deficit: we tend to edit our own work.
Argh.
How often I have scanned a batch of newly minted paragraphs that shimmered on my monitor and wondered if it was at all worth the effort. I stare at the fluorescent radiation that licks the corners of my weary eyes, fingers drumming impatiently on the keyboard, reading, editing, rereading, and reediting.
To be clear – I’m not talking about writing web content, a press release, presentation or brochure. I’m not talking about anything to do with my work as a freelance PR pro or about marketing communications. I’m talking about my novel.
On a small clearing of a workspace that barely accommodates my old stained keyboard and monitors, there are notes piled high amid the fragments of pistachio shells. That stack of wrinkled papers and jotted notes are the filaments of a long-sought novel; bits of dialogue and character biographies that I’m trying to assemble into a cohesive narrative.
What to keep, what to change, what to delete entirely. These are considerations that occupy my foremost cognitive processes while I struggle with this Sisyphean task.
What I feel and what I recall, versus what I’ve read in a book or what I’ve dreamt bounce around my head like an angsty child waiting for desert. Sometimes, I force myself to write – anything, just to write. But on a computer, what a struggle it becomes – especially for an incessant editor such as myself.
There are times that I wished that I had been writing this manuscript with ink and pen. At least if writing the manuscript ultimately killed me, there would be evidence of my heroic 20-year effort to finish this damned book.
An age ago, what a writer laid onto a page was as permanent and indelible as the passage of time. One could edit in the margins, scribble out words or whole paragraphs, but the original act lay naked and visible. Dickens, Shelly, Keats, Hemmingway, Poe and hundreds of other authors left ineradicable trails of ink that scholars use to deconstruct the creative process in a sort of editorial voyeurism that often uncovers the intimate traverses of the author’s changing feelings and self-reflections on the work engaged.
With the intersession of the personal computer, writers opted for the ephemeral medium of word-processing for its incomparable convenience and privacy, but at a precious price. While writing is as much an individual act of creation, the impermanence of the product, the ease in which it can be altered or destroyed, cheapens the investment of time and soul. Those of us who are not yet novelists – weakened by a lack of self-confidence and full grasp of “story” – are most susceptible to tirades of overly capricious self-criticism and endless self-doubt. Poor Sisyphus.
It’s late now. Everybody in the house is asleep. I’m frowzy from hours of my self-inflicted, never ending stone pushing. These are the times I am most prone to depression. I could sit here alone in my little enclave for several hours and listen to the voices of writers whom I admire, urging me to press on. “Once more, into the breech dear friend.”
Sometimes I feel Jack Kirby’s presence hovering over me, reminding me of my promise to him and Roz. Sometimes, it’s Patrick O’Brian, musing at me over his tea (by the way, he wrote all of his novels in longhand). Once in a while, Robert Heinlein will light up a cigarette and glare impatiently over my shoulder. And if I’m in a really masochistic mood, Harlan Ellison will drop by just to accuse me of wasting his time.
I recall now why I chose the moniker “heavypen”; to describe that “rough and all-unable pen” and the image of the bending author that Shakespeare claimed in Henry V. Yeah. I guess I have plenty of company. Maybe the difference between a novelist who succeeds and one who fails is not only the effort expended, but the endurance achieved. -HP
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I have grown weary of whiny journalists and pundits who have such a limited understanding of history and narrow appreciation of things in this country that have worked and worked very well.
Point One: wholesale political changeover equals waste in terms of training new politicos to do a job that takes (by my own estimation) at least a year to acclimate into (and that’s if all you plan to do is be an ideological rubber stamp for the national party). Cynical about my cynicism? If you think that being an elected leader is so easy – then get going and be one. I spent one year as the elected president of our school PTL; a school with only 150 kids. It was almost a full-time job holding meetings, balancing budgets, soothing feelings, negotiating policy and working out compromises. Doing a job like that at the Congressional level should be a million times more difficult. If it isn’t, something is wrong.
Next point, I’ve grown weary of the cynicism of “the other side.” This country has a 200+ year heritage of working out differences; people who are willing to compromise their ideologies for the sake of good statesmanship. The fact that this country has stood for 200+ years with representative governance should be seen as something of a modern-day miracle. So when “the other side” claims that “the other side” is turning the country to ruin, something is wrong. Strong partisanship never produces good governance.
Final point, there isn’t a road made in this country that wasn’t paid by taxes. There isn’t a single inch of our distributed networks (telephone, electricity, water) that doesn’t owe its existence to taxes. All of our public infrastructure – first responders, schools, military services, et al – are paid for with taxes. Our society is wholly and completely supported by the will of the people to pay taxes.
Until somebody comes up with a better way to valuate effort and commoditize resources without money, then we’re stuck with taxes. True, some federal institutions are enormously inefficient, but that’s where the will of the people comes in. Elect professionals who can look beyond partisanship and ideologies – and we will solve problems.
No cynicism needed. -HP
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What was it that they said when the “information super-highway” was first launched? Oh yeah. Print is dead. And it almost died. But then something fabulous happened.
A great sea change occurred. People who use computers found that they longed for the smell of newsprint, the portability of a slick magazine to tuck under their arm. They’re clinging to their print magazines!
Do you doubt?
For the first time since the Great Recession began, both total magazine pages and rate-card-reported revenue have posted gains, according to Publishers Information Bureau (PIB).
Magazine audiences are growing — and young adults are becoming heavy readers. The number of young readers (18+) has grown more than 4% over the past five years. Meanwhile, older audiences (50+) grew by almost 11% in the same period.
As of this year, 93% of adults overall and 96% of adults under age 35 now read magazines.
I grok these stats.
I read untold thousands of words per day. My eyes simply cannot keep it up. I need a break from the glare and the lumens. There’s the computer at work, the computer at home, the flat panel TV, the cell phone, cameras, iPods, e-Readers, camcorders. Ouch.
More than one doctor has commented to me that I should take a break from my electronic world. To ward off carpel tunnel, I use a left-handed trackball, a strange curved keyboard, a special chair, special angles for monitors and keyboards. And yet I suffer from tension headaches, blurry vision, stiff necks and back pain.
I am less patient with trolls and thumpers these days – people who pose as authoritative and knowledgeable sources. I especially despise political bloggers – cannot fathom why anybody should spend that much time ‘commenting’ about the opinions of other commenters. I know. I tried at MIXX – lead a brave fight to stay factual. But to what end? I verify everything before I repeat a single word of what I read online – especially blogs – and I never repeat a single word of what I read in comments. The product from so-called “socialization of publishing” – in my humble opinion – as thus far been less than impressive. Moreover, I think it is one of the destructive forces that are now at work in our society.
I miss professional reporters who know how to unwrap a feature story; who organize and at least try to find corroborating facts. I miss the blend of critical thinking with excellent authorship and professional presentation; a noninteractive print environment that’s easy to read with no animation, no pop-ups, no videos, podcasts or cookies. I miss discovering wonderful tidbits by accident while thumbing through my favorite magazine. Instead, I spend most of my browsing sifting through the guano. Yes, I find the gem or two; sometimes I find things that would have never found its way into a magazine, but the effort takes a toll on me physically.
There’s also the issue of portability. I have a laptop – two actually – but what’s the point? What about the ultimate portability of human-to-print interfacing with good old fashioned ink? Do you really take your laptop everywhere?
I could go on.
Print lingers because it still meets the basic marketing paradigm: it serves a useful purpose. I suppose there will come a day when 100 perfect bound pages of 80 pound gloss stock will be as rare as a rotary phone, but it hasn’t happened yet. And if the stats are correct – it’ll be quite a while yet before we will truly say that print is dead. - HP
Source: Magazine Publishers Association
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