Print is dead. If you’re tearing up a bit, screaming inside your head no it’s not! or having some nostalgic thought about the value of touching a magazine or flipping through the pages of your fave book, rest assured I totally agree. Unfortunately, our feelings about ink printed on a bleached-white or glossy page don’t really play a role in the shifting technologies of communication, though.

In the history of humanity, print is actually a fairly new technology (only 500yrs old). Other popular forms of communication technology have been pictographs on cave and pyramid walls and the oral tradition. During the Old English period, just as print was over the last few centuries, the most popular use of the oral tradition was the ballad (ballad: think villagers sitting around a campfire listening to a poet recite 1000s of lines of memorized poetry). Our Germanic ancestors (Germanic: the family language through which all English speakers inherited their language, not actual German culture) were huge fans of the ballad, and I have a sneaking suspicion that they got all up in arms when the ballad “died.” Er, ceased to exist as a popular form of communication. They probably had the Elizabethan equivalent of forums, Facebook groups, iPhone apps, and hash tags for the irate oral-tradition supporters (#oral tradition 4eva!)

But the only people who give a hoot about the oral tradition today are Lit profs who argue that there’s value to memorizing long bouts of speech. They say it improves our memory or something.

The ballad got thrown out with the bath water, just as print is about to be chopped up and spread all over the digital medium. But the conceptual foundation of communication, the story, or storytelling, isn’t going anywhere. In fact, this form of communication hasn’t changed since cavemen began scratching love notes on walls to their girlfriends.
If you take a closer look at the story form, you’ll find it all boils down to one fundamental ingredient: the analogy. (If you’re thinking, what the heck is an analogy? think of it as something that represents something else. Like pictographs.) Pictographs represent either a single or collective concept, just like words. Ex: a picture of something brown, with leaf-like structures represents a tree, just as the word tree represents all things brownish that have leaves and undergo photosynthesis.

In communication, we use words to represent single or collective concepts and string them together in sentences, paragraphs, essays, blog posts, tweets, or status updates. (Some rhetoric scholars say that the analogy is the fundamental piece by which we understand reality. Unlike print or the oral tradition, we will enjoy the ability to perceive reality, in some form or another, for a very long time.) Even though print-the-technology is pushing daisies, the fundamental ingredient, the analogy, and its partner in crime, the story, is not.

Will the technology by which we transmit story change? Yep, and it will make as many waves as print did. The birth of print welcomed (more) equal opportunity access to a wealth of knowledge (some elite theologians and scholars got pretty upset about this), reading became a daily activity, and they had a way more organized system for keeping permanent records.

Was print met with opposition in the 16th century? For sure. But the benefits of print far out-weighed its former competitor, the oral tradition. Just as the benefits of digital medium outweigh print. For ex: increased connectivity to friends and family, various audio and visual elements that improve neural connections and brain mapping,and access to an ever growing number of cached sites (cached: the internet stores a copy of every site so you can view it even if the site’s server goes down).

Sure, it’s sad that print is picking turnips with a step ladder, but this hopeful rhetor can’t help but categorize this as a necessary step in the progress of humanity. Er, at least the progress of rhetorical theory.

photo credit above: laurelpapworth.com