Adrian uploaded on the Networked Media page a really interesting post regarding The Onion’s article entitled Print Dead at 1.803. (wow that was a lot of hyperlinks).
I love The Onion. And I’m so glad Adrian was able to find an article that was entirely relevant to our course that I can blog about, as their sharp wit and satirical humour has never ceased to entertain and amaze me. Their ironic anti-news satire is such a politically and socially charged standpoint against the nature of media itself. The paradox of making their site look completely realistic like a genuine news website is self-inflicting, sarcastic and sardonic humour that remains quite intellectual.
This tongue-in-cheek article presents the death of “print” media like an obituary, commenting about print’s life, history, origins and impact.
“Though print enjoyed a long, illustrious career for centuries, effortlessly reinventing itself countless times in order to better serve readers’ continual desire for information, in recent years observers reported that the medium was gradually slowing down its output, with both the quantity and quality of its work suffering as it struggled to keep up in a fast-paced landscape increasingly dominated by younger, more nimble channels such as the internet, email, and social media.”
This article and this passage in particular are so relevant to the course we’re studying right now at even my previous post about nostalgia from the 00’s. In the Media industry, it’s so important to keep up with the rapid technological advancements that have enormous impacts on the way the public and the individual receive and view media. Improving technology is the reason behind the emergence of “mass media” (that is, a message sent from a receive to a broad and wide audience) that has drastically changed the concept of communication within society.
This article denounces print media to be dead, making way for a new entirely online era of communications and media. As sad as it is, I tend to agree with this article, as technology has made it far too easy to access all the information we could possibly need at the click of a button, making newspapers, magazines and reference books rather redundant. Major newspapers have partly succumbed to this pressure by creating websites and Apps in order to stay afloat while hardcopy print media sadly gurgles underwater.
Books are now available electronically and for free as well, making Apple Books and Kindle the cheaper, easier, faster and more accessible option for bookworms.
That said, many people still love the feeling of a paperback in their hands or the sound of the newspaper pages turning while they sip their morning coffee, but this is increasingly becoming a pleasure of the past. We are certainly becoming a society of square eyes which are slowly looking away from the 1,803 year old method of putting ink to paper.
