By Ankush
Ioften take it for granted that physical newspapers will one day be adistant memory. Newspapers will continue to survive -- fewer perhaps,and with a different sense of purpose in an age of constantly updated,on-demand news -- but the age of newsprint will one day come to a close. And would that be so bad?
Bill Powers -- one of only a few media critics consistently worth reading, though hardly infallible -- has a lengthy paper explaining what's so great about paper. I don't like it as much as his friends do (it's unnecessarily long; if you're interested, you'd do well to start at page 32), but it's a solid meditation on what it is that makes physical paper such an enduring medium. Here's just one reason:
Becauseonline documents have no physical presence, when we're reading them theeyes and the brain are constantly at work figuring out where we are inthe text, not just on the page displayed but in the document as a wholeand vis-à-vis other open documents, as well as where we need to gonext. The online reader expends a great deal of mental energy justnavigating. Paper's tangibility allows the hands and fingers to takeover much of the navigational burden, freeing up the brain to think.
There'smuch more of that. Much of it seems self-evident, since paper is suchan integral part of our lives, but Powers's methodical explanation ofthe various advantages that paper affords readers is a useful exercise.
Giventhe advantages of paper, Powers argues that it's bound to endure, butthe purpose to which newspapers put it will probably change. The"long-form, in-depth" material is likely to stick to print, wherepeople prefer reading it, while "hard news and other utilitarian,quick-read content" is left to the web. Again, maybe that seems ratherobvious, but when was the last time you thought hard about how great paper actually is?
