Print’s not dead

What would have happened if Johannes Gutenberg had invented the internet during his secretive researches in Strasbourg in the 1440s?

 

The question occurred to me the other day, while listening to a senior marketing executive sighing at the thick-headed, short-sighted, media veterans who just don’t get “it”. By “it”, the marketer meant the fact that the internet was the future of communication while printing, that quaint, old fashioned technology, would be about as relevant to the development of the mass media as the stagecoach was to transport policy in the 21st century.

 

Mindless oafs like me, it seemed, just didn’t recognise this big picture. At this point, I began to spin my alternate history scenario. What if Gutenberg had, through some technological alchemy, invented the internet in 1440? And, taking this scenario a bit further, what if a groovy college drop-out had invented the book in a garage in California in the late 1970s?

 

In this battle between two technologies, the internet would have the disadvantage of age and familiarity. The book, on the other hand, might be regarded as the trendy new killer app. Geeks would gather, electronically, to discuss the rumoured benefits of this bizarre new form of IT. They would marvel at the suggestion that this thing called a book was actually completely platform-independent, required no special software, hardware or electric power to use, was more portable than any laptop, would not have to be expensively upgraded to keep up with technological change, might last a careful user their entire lifetime, and could cost less than £10. Best of all, according to leaked reports from one beta test, you never turned to a page in a book to find a message saying “Sorry, article not found or expired”.

 

Merely to spin such a fantasy is to run the risk of being accused of being a Luddite. I am not. I simply do not believe that any single technology, even one as profound, powerful and as liberating as the internet, could replace a technology as downright convenient as print. Any more than I believed the theory, put out by Wired magazine in 1997, that the technology-fuelled boom of the late 1990s would last for 20 years.

 

I do believe the internet is revolutionising media and that this transformation has only just begun. But as the internet grows, it is taking on some of the characteristics of older media in ways many marketers and companies refuse to recognize. The old Field Of Dreams “If you build a website they will come” approach to corporate communication on the web is as passé as Kevin Costner but many companies, in practice, still operate on this basis. Yet they only have to look at the digital TV universe to see this doesn’t work.

 

In TV’s multiverse, the hype suggested that content was to be king. In fact, it has had to share its throne with marketing. As couch potatoes, we seem to have a certain bandwidth – we have a certain number of channels we like to watch, and, because of the way our brains work, that doesn’t increase exponentially just because the choice does – and we need to be prompted, cajoled, incentivised to go beyond that.

 

The same principle applies to the internet. That’s one of the many areas I believe print still has a powerful role to play. (For a far more erudite summary of the pivotal role print – or more especially paper – plays in our lives, I invite you to read Malcolm Gladwell’s article in New Yorker.

 

If you’re trying to reach out to people who don’t know your business – or do know it and have already decided you stink – the printed product still has a cache, prestige and charisma that the internet can, as yet, only aspire to. Print’s edge is even greater with the people you most want to impress – the folk a consultant friend of mine used to call, with a note of reverence in his voice, “the key decision makers” – who don’t have the time, or the inclination, to surf the web, never open links in emails and are unlikely to stumble across your website in cyberspace.

 

For these VIPs, receiving an intelligently made, brilliantly targeted, well designed, printed product is actually much more flattering than being invited to join a forum, offered a small bribe to visit your website or being asked to click here to read your thoughts on the environment, IT platforms or the peculiar difficulties facing the Bulgarian economy. Indeed, if you really want to interest someone in the Bulgarian economy, you might have more joy doing so in print, which can do the really clever thing of presenting us with considerable depth of information in such a way that we find it very easy to digest.

 

Elvis is dead. It’s taken me far too long to accept that. But print, though it has changed enormously since Gutenberg fiddled with movable type nearly 570 years ago, isn’t.