Moving Beyond the Book.

I really enjoyed George Landow's essay, "Twenty Minutes into the Future, or How Are We Moving Beyond the Book?" (214). I just felt that this piece spoke to me because of something that the world of print journalism is going through at the moment.

After spending all winter break working with a new George Mason Student Media effort to have a new daily news site with me being the editor in chief of a weekly paper that is truly obsolete in a sense, I have been a bit disheartened regarding the future of journalism. With the Washington Post and the LA Times both laying off 150+ workers because they just do not have the money to pay for them due to lack of ad sales revenue, I can actually see the world of print journalism dying step by step.

I do see a similar idea being expressed by Landow in the first few pages of his essay because printed books are just not a popular medium of literature. And while print journalism and books have a such a long tradition in every culture, this is just the mark of the future. It goes along with the trend of "going green" and creating a sustainable environment, which reminds me of a tip that I got in my newspaper office.

A few students from Student Government went down to Richmond with a few administrators from the school and they heard about plans to build an $80 library on campus (maybe it was just $80 million worth of renovations). These students wondered why we are spending that much money on a new library because 1) we have so many books and articles online now that it seems like a waste of money, especially when the school is in debt (according to the students), and 2) with our school advertising this desire to be the center for education on climate control and sustainability, should we not be innovative in creating a complete eLibrary that would not require us to spend that much money on the use of more resources?

While this eLibrary is a very innovative idea, I do not believe that this will ever happen, just as I do not believe that print newspapers will ever completely die out--at least not in my time. There is just too much tradition and too many people who enjoy the hard copy of a newspaper or book in their hands.

Landow also writes about the design of next textbooks that are available to college students. He writes that current college textbooks have such a different design than the books that he used while attending school. This was interesting to me because it went along with the message of Writing Machines. The design of a book is what keeps print editions exciting, which is why the position of designer is such a highly desired job.

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I know that this breaking off into a random statement, but the use of electronic means to publish anything--books, news stories, blogs--makes words more permanent in a sense. The words that I use and the things that I do while online are constantly being monitored in ways that I do not know. There has recently been talks about how students would delete their Facebook page only to be able to request to open it again without having to re-create their page at all because Facebook kept them all in a file. I believe that now there is the option to delete a Facebook page forever, but it is still a bit unnerving that whatever I do can be traced back to me. Sorry that was a bit random, it's just something I thought of while reading Landow's explanation of new technologies...