(PHOTO: The August 6 self-reflexive front page of The Washington Post)
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Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos, who just bought the Washington Post for $250M, said last year in an interview with the Berliner-Zeitung:
"There is one thing I'm certain about: there won't be printed newspapers in twenty years. Maybe as luxury items in some hotels that want to offer them as an extravagant service. Printed papers won't be normal in twenty years."
By the time that prediction would come to pass, one of the favorite morning Proustian rituals in western households would have gone extinct too: the rustle of newspapers around the kitchen table; the whiff of strong coffee and toasts and omelette;....
But this kind of dire prognostication made by Bezos about printed newspapers had also often been made about printed books--and yet, "hardcopy" books are still around in this era of Bezos's own Kindle, or iPad and other tablets. And, more importantly, reading hasn't vanished altogether.
The French prolific philosopher and erstwhile Che Guevara's compadre Régis Debray says that each era is defined by its own "mediasphere"--the prevailing mode of transmission and communication.
Debray identifies 4 historical mediaspheres:
1) The Logosphere: Oral transmission;
2) The Graphosphere: Printed transmission;
3) The Videosphere: Analog transmission; and
4) The Hypersphere: Digital transmission.
(These successive mediaspheres may be deemed specific to the West. For in the Congo, there was a mode of transmission via tom-tom that Debray's systems of transmission don't account for. I'd call the tom-tom transmission the "sonosphere" or "percussiosphere" for lack of better neologisms.)
Though each mediasphere generates its own behavioral "wirings" in people living in its bubble, old technologies generated in one mediasphere don't just vanish for good when a new mediasphere opens up.
These old technologies get recycled, re-used or integrated in more creative ways.
Thus, for example, today's tablets --and computers for that matter--rediscover, re-experience, and incorporate the combined stances, gestures, and even the materiality of baked-clay tablets, scrolls, and codex (the old linear book form in hard copy).
And the sliding screens of the tablet and computer duplicates somewhat the palimpsestic writing mode or mindset of the baked-clay tablet.
But between the "bricks on the bookshelves [...] spaced out nobly in lanes of menhirs" (Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, often quoted by Debray) of the graphosphere and the liquid, fluid, transparent hypertextual reality of the hypersphere, there's a huge gap in mentalities.
One is linear, the other non-linear; on the one hand, the individual silence of the library; and on the other, the fleeting texting and cybersurfing in crowded spaces (the cybercafe, the corner coffee shop with Wi-Fi access, or the living-room while cable TV is on).
No wonder then that opinion polls conducted on NSA snooping exposed by Edward Snowden show that a chunk of the young demographic (18- to 29-year-olds)--those wholly immersed in Debray's hypersphere--is more concerned about "transparency" than "privacy" (18- to 29-years-olds are used to online data mining by companies). Members of that demographic wholeheartedly support Snowden and expect more transparency from government.
(http://m.usatoday.com/article/news/2435005)
In 20 years' time, a whole western generation would've grown up "wholly immersed in Debray's hypersphere." And to claim as Bezos does that "printed papers won't be normal in 20 years," is an odd truism coming from such a visionary genius.
I keep pegging these developments as specific to the western world. Africa still has to bridge the still gaping digital divide.
In the DRC, twenty years hence, a huge section of the population will still be living in the "sonosphere" of the word-of-mouth information (WOMI) of the rumor mill of Radio-Trottoir.
In the interim, those of us connecting to the internet from the penniless boondocks of the Empire should celebrate Bezos taking over The Washington Post. The man doesn't believe that charging online users will ever balance the books of struggling newspapers. And now it's rumored he's scrapping the paywall The Washington Post was gearing for.
Kudos to Jeff Bezos then...
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PHOTO CREDITS: Newseum (@Newseum) Twitter picture