lu viii
Every word and each line of type made in metal. No shadows or phosphors, but metal; molten, frozen and cast into fixed meaning before the composition goes ahead.
So the Linotype University rendezvous for 2010 is over and we return to the world of screen reading. Old hands from England, Australia, the town of Kansas Oklahoma and parts East gathered in Denmark Iowa for eight straight days of shop and memories. The old (106 years) model five (as shown) would not second justify and tricked the machinists into nightmares and epiphanies. Meanwhile Ruth, the fastest living, composed away (on one of the last model 31s) in the din.
augmented reality check
The academic, library and book arts communities are overly relaxed as screen simulations eclipse the role of print. Academic communities watch the overhaul of university presses as print editions become subservient and expendable. Library communities are transfixed as acquisitions budgets tip overwhelmingly from print to electronic resources. Book arts communities wander onward with handmade works while students move to the expressive allure of the screen.
What should be the action item? The three communities should now be actively advocating for the logic of the interdependence of print and screen. The eerie compatibility of the two transmission methods now needs its own promotion.
johns at madison
“Far from being writers – founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses – readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy themselves.” Michel de Certeau
Adrian Johns presented a fabulous lecture titled “How Readers Became Poachers: Modern Media and the Sciences of Reception”. He described an increasing importance of reader surveillance and the social sciences and commercial agencies that emerged to analyze reading audiences. His focus is on the mid-twentieth century in England as broadcast radio began to infringe dependence on newspapers. (He has a forthcoming book on the topic.)
During the 1920’s the Daily Mail sold 30 million copies daily. Adding other newspaper circulations an average of two newspapers were delivered daily for each person in England. This physical publication empire tabulated a wealth of circulation statistics and letters to the Editor to analyze reader reception of the news.
As radio broadcasting began to augment this print medium it became apparent that monitoring listening patterns and listener reception of programming presented an entirely new challenge. The immaterial broadcast was transmitted to an immaterial audience. Local and demographic program preference and time blocks of the program day needed differentiation. Johns went on to outline the methods of monitoring a listening audience as a new social history of media emerged. Economic factors arose and patterns of product consumption played into the agenda. Advertising agencies emerged. Add to this, by the 1930’s, the BBC was being provoked by pirate broadcasters such as the IBC (International Broadcasting Company).
Radio broadcasting prompted new social history and theory. The monopoly of the BBC was studied both as an influence for moral and educational advance of the working class as well as an instrument of mass persuasion. The listener was positioned as if a self-appropriating print reader, independent and somewhat inscrutable. But if the listener continued to be a “poacher”, new “game keepers” were also developing.
Here the Johns model of the reader/listener conveys forward to a reader/looker relation as suggested by the i-Pad exemplar merge of textual and visual literacy. He mentioned the increasing role of the game keeper as represented by Amazon data mining of customer preference and reader response.
The Johns lecture was laced with humor and entertaining comments. He described an early pirate broadcaster who tried to transmit from off-shore but the transmitter was too heavy for the available ship so he skirted the beach with loud speaker programming. In a less light comment, he mentioned the stymied U of C History faculty that could not define its method of study of non-textual literacy and immaterial media. Christine Pawley added a similar note when she announced an October 20 forum to discuss insertion of a new word into the name of the School of Library and Information Science. The new word is “digital”. (My guess is that the L word can be eliminated.) SDIS