“People under 30 don’t read printed material.”
- First and Pike News owner Lee Lauckhart, 2019
Alaska Airlines magazine is gone. The newsstand at Seattle’s Pike Place Market is gone. Newspapers are almost gone from Hudson News at the airport. See if you can find them. They’re tucked back in the corner, beneath pop fiction.
Hudson News has officially dropped “news” from its name. It’s Hudson now.
The printed word is disappearing from our world and that’s not a good thing.
It’s a victory for two purveyors of ignorance: Computer nerd titans and the dopes opposed to “book learnin.”
Also for an entire legion of neo-fascists waiting in the wings of every nation hoping that the citizenry forgets decency, compassion, tradition, laws and justice. You know, the things that most of us learned in school – from books.
The printed word is essential because we are tactile animals. We attach importance to the things we can touch – like our bodies, our loved ones, our homes, our food and our clothes. Those things are real to us.
The family Bible is real to us. So are photographs we keep in albums.
There’s a reason that radical right-wingers are now rooting through school libraries, weeding out the texts that challenge their extremist philosophy. They’re not going after the Internet or TV. They’re going after books because words in print have power.
Books can be read and read again, studied for hours, committed to memory. When was the last time anyone studied anything for hours on a computer screen?
Ask any high school teacher who was teaching 30 years ago the difference between students then and now. They’ll tell you this: Today’s students are quick and know a lot more than we did at the same age. But they’re weak at tasks requiring sustained concentration.
A reporter friend with a dozen books to his credit remarked at a journalism convention a few years ago: “The Internet promised to be better than print because there wouldn’t be word limits. So why is it that websites won’t buy anything longer than 500 words?”
Indications are we’re already paying a price for abandoning print. Let’s look at Donald Trump as Exhibit A. Trump is all bluff and bluster, a carnival barker and bully who berates opponents. But without TV cameras, his act fails. In print his words are pure buffoonery.
There’s an old newspaper fable about the crooked politician soon to be exposed who phones the reporter who has the goods on him the night before the story is to break and says, “Listen, kid. That story can’t come out. What do you want? I’ll give you any amount of money for that story.”
“It’s yours tomorrow morning for a dime,” the reporter tells him.
The story doesn’t work if the politician is talking to some schmuck who maintains a blog. Who would care?
You can say what you like. You can tweet or email or post anything. Those words disappear into the ether almost as fast as they’re uttered or clicked.
But not print. Print cannot be ignored or retracted. It’s right there in black and white. You can see it and touch it and cut it out and carry it around in your wallet. It does not go away.
In my almost 40 years of attending government meetings, I can’t remember anyone ever standing up at a public meeting to testify that they were concerned about a news story they heard on the radio or saw on the Internet. It is always one that they read in the newspaper.
Print sticks. Besides its physically permanent qualities, here’s why:
The printed word is expensive to publish. Trees must be cut down. Ink must be spilled. Print means that the message was worthy enough to bother the cost of putting into print. Just as the words above the courthouse were important enough to be etched in stone.
We are dazzled and entertained by a cybermedia that generates dizzying amounts of information it feeds to us constantly on our devices.
Print, on the other hand, is slow and by its nature, will last forever. If you had only one form of information on which to build a civilization, which would you choose? How about for maintaining a civilization?