Documenta: Setting the better example

We are fond of talking about the challenges and opportunities facing books in the electronic age as analogous to those faced by music. During the How to Survive the Paper Industry talk however, Alessandro Ludovico of Neural magazine made a simple but salient point: the experience of listening to music on an iPod in an mp3 format is fundamentally the same as listening to music on a Walkman in a cassette format. Whereas, he asserts, the experience of reading words on a screen is different than reading them printed in a book—both in the physical experience and in the mental projections of quality and permanence. These are arguably surmountable issues. We may yet become accustomed to the idea that digital words can have as much mental weight as their printed ancestors, and a device may yet be built that better captures the nuances of the printed and bound book. Nonetheless, the point that music isn't an apt analogy for books is a good one.

Simon Worthington of Mute suggests photography may be a better starting point. Here are these physical, emotionally-loaded objects—photographs—that have now become almost completely digital. And have done so successfully. Gone is film and paper and instead we have Megapixels and JPEGs. So, instead of asking what the publishing world can learn from music, maybe we would indeed be better served by asking what we can learn from photography.

•  Thousands of new photos are uploaded to Flickr every minute, where users can organize, share, or create. Perhaps most notable, Flickr as an open API, which means anyone can create their own program to work with and present Flickr photo data.
•  Digital photography itself encourages more experimentation. Being able to instantly see a photo you've taken, and to take another without any additional cost (memory space is virtually free), people take a lot more photos and either delete or simply ignore the bad ones. And just like an artist that draws everyday, experimentation and practive can only have a positive effect on quality.
•  Sites like iStockphoto allow users an easy way to make money from their digital photographs. And the fact that they make money incrementally (most photos cost $1-5) is an important detail, and not necessarily a negative one.
•  The camera has been integrated both into a multi-function device (mobile phones) and as a standalone device, digital cameras. And it's not uncommon that people will have and use both.
•  The lack of object permanence with a digital photo seems to have been overcome. Was it because the experience of photography became strong enough in the digital space that it outweighed the loss of the object?
•  The big losers in the digital photo revolution? The makers of the materials that used to convey the content—film and paper—not the makers of the content itself.

This post stems from the July 17 lecture during Documenta's Paper to Pixels Week, entitled How to Survive the Paper Industry. The speakers were Simon Worthington (Mute, London) and Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, Bari), and it was moderated by Nat Muller (Rotterdam). You can hear the whole talk via podcast or read the blog summary on LabforCutlure.org. (On the podcast, the first couple minutes of intro are in German, but the rest is in English.)