Long live the page! By MAR-VIC CAGURANGAN For Saipan Tribune

MANILA –At the E-conomy forum 101 held at the Ayala Towers on Monday, the audience, composed mostly of newspaper men and women, laughed when the last question was read: “Will the digital technology push the newspaper industry out of business?”

The question wasn’t exactly funny. The audience laughed because, among the questions earlier asked, the last one hit home, and was waiting for an answer that we, the nondigital sector, should clearly understand. We laughed probably because it seemed to be the most convenient gesture to conceal a collective fear. The question is actually translated: “Are we, people of the print, still going to be of any use to the society? Or are we going to be jobless soon? Will people still read?”

These are relevant concerns at the dawn of the digital age, when everything can be reached by fingertips in 30 seconds: stock quotes, email messages, weather reports, current news, and even legal documents. They’re on screens, big and small—digitalized and assembled by codes.
Every information will flash on screen in thoughtless tidbits.

“People of the Book” (as the Time magazine refers to the good people who make and read newspapers, magazine, and books) fear that the page—the writing and the reading—will die, and the screen culture will take over altogether.

It’s interesting that the invitation card to the forum bore the phrase “brave new world,” which instead of reminding us of Shakespeare, would actually give us the shudder of Aldous Huxley’s artificial “A.F. civilization” created by technology— a civilization bereft of humanity and all that goes with it such as magic, romance and poetry.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, Shakespeare and the wisdom of pages are banned into oblivion. But here, that won’t really be the case, according to the pundits at Monday’s E-conomy forum, who all gave reassuring replies. The print, one of the panelists said, will disappear “only if one can invent a PC that can swat a fly.”

If anything, they said, the computer and digital technology will simply be an additional setup to complement the traditional means of getting news and other information. Keep in mind that the television and radio did not replace books, magazines and newspapers.

“Even though people get information off the Internet, the print will stay. I still want to see print,” another panelist said. “There’s something about reading a newspaper.”
There’s magic in turning the pages of newspaper over a morning cup of coffee.
There’s poetry in watching the newsboy flash the headlines amid the morning traffic. With newspaper, you can react to news with passion; you can cut out your favorite articles or draw horns and fangs on the pictures of columnists whose crap you can’t stand.

The newspaper can preserve history, which the posterity can review. (In Orwell’s 1984, which had envisioned the cyberspace, history can change almost every hour in the dynamic flux of the screen.)

And the book? It has texture and weight that give a pleasant presence in the hand. There’s nothing like being curled up in a couch, reading Brothers Karamasov under the lamp. And nothing smells as good as a new book—big or small, hardcover or softcover. The old ones don’t smell bad either. They give the odor of history.

Book, that perfect thing, says Stephen King, “speaks without speaking, needs no batteries, and never crashes unless you throw it in the corner.”

At any rate, the Time magazine predicts, the clash between the print culture and the screen culture will end in harmonious reconciliation.
“The people of the Screen (working in places like E Ink or Xerox) are creating thin films of paper and plastic that hold digital ink. A piece of paper then becomes a paper screen.
One minute it has a poem on it, the next it has the weather. Bind a hundred of these digital pages between covers and you have a book that can change its content, yet still be read like a book.”

Yes, the print will not die. We will keep turning pages.