Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

B. Richter and Dirk Reinbold, which uses falling pictograms of various
sizes, each of which links to a different news story. In this case, the unstoppable
flow of (filtered) news stories (each summarised in a headline
and a few keywords) must be quickly ‘grabbed’ (clicked) in order to
be read at all. The ‘game’ of trying to intercept news, relevant to the
player’s personal interests, but continuously falling in a downpour of
content, is revealed here to be an essential aspect of living in a crowded
and polluted world of ‘infotainment’. Again, the concept of preemptive
news, speculating on the public imagination, is an important part of
this game.
3.4 space, physicality, and repeatability of print.
So does print still make sense, in a society which is by now almost entirely
networked as well as screen-based? Print does have a number of
unique characteristics which are yet to be superseded by anything else.
The first of these characteristics is the way print uses space. The space
taken up by printed materials, whether in the shape of document folders,
stacks of printed pages on a table, or a library of shelves filled with
books, is real and physical. This is entirely different from something
existing only on a screen, since it relates directly to our physical space,
and to a sensorial perception developed over (at least) thousands of
years.
When everything is reduced to the display screen, some kind of
‘simulation’ of space becomes necessary, since everything now must fit
within these few inches. Also, in order to make the simulation understandable
and/or realistic, any system for finding one’s way (‘navigating’)
within this virtual space should include a consistent interface, allowing
for multiple perspectives and levels of viewing. Unfortunately,
there has never been a clear standard for implementing this. The different
strategies, symbols (icons, pictograms) and navigational structures
of various competing systems have not yet succeeded in presenting
readers of virtual printed content with a set of standards that they
can easily become accustomed to. The result is that a so-called ‘clean’
virtual reading space remains more unfamiliar than the ‘messy’ physical
one.
Another important characteristic of paper is the ‘repeatability’ of
traditional print. Reading a magazine or a book means being part of
a community of customers all reading exactly the same content, so
they can all share a single reference. As Marshall McLuhan noted in
Understanding Media: “Repeatability is the core of the mechanical
principle that has dominated our world, especially since the Gutenberg
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