--From the "Flourish" issue of UP Magazine--
I read all the time growing up. In the years before kindergarten and elementary school, my mom and I flipped through picture books and she read me stories of mystery and magic, talking animals, and hilarious adventures. Once I was able to read on my own, I couldn’t put books down. I loved the wonderful worlds captured on the pages and I longed to learn and experience more. Reading was an escape from the mundane world around me; I could bury myself in the stories of characters with lives much more interesting than my own.
The reading I do now is much different. I skim articles online, scroll through posts on Twitter, glance at news apps, and occasionally flip through textbooks for class. Everything I read is so real; there’s no escape from the world happening around me.
In elementary school, sometimes we got to go to the computer lab where we’d play online games and practice typing on the keyboards. The internet was exciting and fun, and it was a nice break from fractions and history lessons. In middle school, I got an iPod touch and played Fruit Ninja or Doodle Jump and messaged my friends on the Facebook account I definitely should not have had at that age. In high school, we were issued individual laptops that we used to read, research, and write. But naturally, we’d sit in class and play online Tetris or talk in Google Hangouts in an attempt to escape the teacher’s lecture. All of us in our late teens to late 20s grew up with so much of this technology that was progressively introduced throughout the years. Now, it’s everywhere.
When was the last time you picked up a physical book to read? No, not the one your professor made you buy for class. What about a magazine? We take notes on our laptops, scroll through photos in digital albums, type out comments and captions and essays on keyboards: everything is published online. The books I treasured as a kid and the wondrous tales they told now feel like stories themselves.
The push toward digital is inevitable and inescapable. The efficiency and scope the digital world offers us has created jobs, maintained relationships, cultivated curiosity, and presented us with entirely new opportunities in all fields. So, what has happened to the print industry in this booming digital age?
The answer is complicated. Print hasn’t gone anywhere; magazines, books, and newspapers continue to be published every day. But there is an overwhelming question to consider: is print dying?
To be clear, writing is not dying. From business and marketing to health care and law, writing is a crucial aspect of every field. But that writing doesn’t look the same as it used to. With laptops, phones, and tablets dominating our day to day communication, the writing we consume often comes to us on screens. Newspapers and magazines publish online, textbooks are made digital, bloggers post on websites—our eyes are scrolling over pixels instead of our fingers flipping through pages.
There are conflicting opinions on the death of print, especially as technology has become more mainstream. A Columbia Journalism Review article by Michael Rosenwald titled “Print is dead. Long live print” explores this conflict between print and digital. Rosenwald writes about Roger Fidler who, in the early 1980s, imagined the future of news in his publications: instantly published stories, millions of people reached, eliminated operation and labor costs, screens that effortlessly displayed any and all words.
Fidler’s predictions were spot on. Just two decades later, this future started to become a reality. But are newspapers pursuing a digital future that will never come?
“What if everything we’ve been led to believe about the future of journalism is wrong?” Rosenwald analyzes in his article. Large newspapers have gone under and thousands of journalists have lost their jobs. The basis for transferring print to digital was that readers—specifically millennials—prefer immediacy, but this expectation may not be as accurate as once thought.
Digital news is one thing; real-time updates and easy access to articles can be helpful for keeping up with developing stories. But newspapers have struggled to move much of their content and business online which begs the question: do all publications require this immediacy? Looking back on his visions of print from the 1980s, Fidler explains “that replicating print in a digital device is much more difficult than what anybody, including me, imagined.”
Whether it’s being distracted by a banner ad or the fact that Netflix is in the bookmarks bar, reading online is just not the same. There’s something about holding the words you’re reading in your hands; it changes the experience. UP Magazine Publisher, Astrid Cabello, explains that “having something in print, to hold in your hand is something that you just can't replicate digitally, no matter how hard you try.”
This is a huge factor for design, too. Any creative knows the power of a pen and paper. All of the scribbles and sketches, rough drafts, and ambitious ideas that litter notebooks and scrap paper—that’s where everything has always started. The same goes for photos. Polaroids and disposable cameras have made a comeback in recent years, especially with younger generations that are so used to digital versions. There’s something special about being able to hold a photo, frame it, or put it up on the wall. It feels more permanent; able to endure all of the change and chaos we see every day. It’s so easy to alter the words and images found online, but with print, there’s an element of stability that lets us know, “I’m not going anywhere.” Though Flourish comes to you digitally due to COVID-19, all of us on UP’s staff agree, there’s no better feeling than holding a copy of the magazine and flipping through the pages of hard work that have come together so beautifully. We cherish these kinds of things.
There is absolutely a nostalgia that emanates from print. Print is a reminder of childhood. Print is a starting block. Print is a statement. Print is trust. All of the technology we live and breathe now is the culmination of a once simpler product—one that has yet to die off. So, even though digital domination has become a norm, it by no means negates the gravity of print.
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