Part 3

Words and Pictures

The dominant media of the nineteenth century featured printed material, with pictures supplementing the written text of newspapers, magazines, and books—our oldest mass media. Print media have played a significant role in our society, becoming the depository of information and narratives so that we now have a record of our culture’s best ideas and finest stories. Print media enabled individualism—the concept that people were no longer bound by the rules and rituals of tribal communities and could seek new ways of thinking—and democracy to flourish, as literate citizens could access more information from newspapers, magazines, and books to better inform their judgments.

These media did not disappear when music, radio, and TV came along in the twentieth century. Rather, the newspaper, magazine, and book industries adapted. And in the twenty-first century, the story of our oldest media is still about adapting, but this time in the age of Apple and Amazon. As older media make the digital turn, daily papers, sports magazines, and romance novels are all transformed on digital tablets, like Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle. We are still reading newspapers, subscribing to magazines, and buying books; they now just come in multiple forms—from their old printed versions to their new digital incarnations.

Still, even with the rich older histories of our printed media, we wonder whether rising technological innovation and crumbling business models are obstacles too big to overcome. Indeed, online start-up companies like craigslist created havoc in the newspaper industry by demonstrating better and cheaper ways to display classified advertising. Great old newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times still drift into bankruptcy as newspaper stock prices plunge and critics forecast their doom. In addition, we saw the venerable magazine Newsweek, around since 1933, sell for $1 in 2010 and then disappear in its print form in 2013 (although a new owner relaunched a print edition of Newsweek in March 2014). In 2011, we witnessed the demise of the megabookstore chain Borders, which failed to adapt fast enough to the digital turn and in the end could not compete with online behemoths like Amazon, only a few years ago a start-up company itself.

As we wrestle with the changes of the digital age, does it make any difference whether we get our news from a printed newspaper or an online Web site? Does it matter if we hold a physical magazine or even this textbook in our hands, or is an online version just as good? Digital versions of printed text can be updated, modified, and augmented far more easily, but they lack the traditional physical property of words and pictures printed on paper. What is clear is that newspapers, magazines, and books will continue in some form. Perhaps these forms will represent something entirely new, but the forms pioneered by earlier, physical versions of newspapers, magazines, and books will continue to shape that digital content, even as the ways they are read and interpreted change.

HOW WE READ NOW