A Little History, and the Future of Publishing
Philip Leigh has a really interesting piece about the future of publishing on MediaPost.
He writes that just as “the printing press transformed publishing, the true cultural significance of blogging — which is only incipient at present — will be a consequence of its production process. “
When I was in comm school, we called that technological determinism and, after much debate, arrived at the conclusion that in fact cultural change is so complex than attributing change to any one cause is always going to result in fallacy and misdirection.
That said, there is certainly some great insight into Leigh’s analysis. The invention of the rotary press circa 1830 resulted in an explosion called the newspaper industry. (Which had previously been low-budget, low-circulation affairs that mainly announced ship movements.)
But we have to ask a question here: was the rotary press invented out of whole cloth or was it invented because there was a need for high-speed print-production capability?
Leigh continues:
Similarly, it’s likely that the future of blogging — and the future spread of knowledge — will reflect the characteristics of whatever blog platform achieves dominance. Increasingly it appears that the winner will be WordPress. It first appeared seven years ago as a successor to software typically used for online diaries. Thus, it was originally text-based, but has since evolved to also encompass audio, video, and animation. It has even become a popular platform for entire websites as well as important components of prominent sites such as The New York Times.
As an evangelizer of WordPress, I’m happy to hear that it is the future. But, again, my question: did blogging software get invented “just because”? (Let’s call that the Mt. Everest argument: we climbed it because it was there.) Or was such software developed because there is a social need for a way for non-technically inclined folks to manage web sites?
I think the latter is the obvious answer, and Leigh touches on that when he describes the “virtuous cycle” that is driving the evolution of WordPress:
since WordPress is open-source it’s steadily improved by an ecosystem of free programmers. Unlike slave laborers, they are compensated by mutual enhancements to the tool. Consequently, WordPress capabilities evolve rapidly. WordPress market share gains feed a virtuous cycle of more volunteer programmers, providing added improvements, inducing accelerated evolution, which combine to steadily leave competitors behind.
I suspect Leigh thinks he has addressed the question of what the underlying social need is with the current evolutionary state of blogging software: it’s capable of handling “multimedia.” Personally, I think “multimedia” is a marketing wiggle-word; it doesn’t really mean anything new or different, it’s simply a way for creative-services companies to ostensibly add value to their services.
The convergence of text, images, and moving images is not yet the televisual revolution that WordPress and other softwares potentially entail.
My hunch is that we haven’t even begun to see the potential changes these technologies will bring. Never in the history of human communication has technology so well and truly put the means of production into the hands of non-specialists. Whether this is democritization or banalization remains to be seen.
Stay tuned!
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