From the Print Media to the Internet by Marie Lebert (mobile ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Journalists and editors working on-screen could go directly from text to page make-up, which eliminated the need for rekeying and shifted preliminary typesetting functions from the production to the editorial staff. In book publishing, digitization has speeded up the editorial process, which used to be sequential, by allowing the copy editor, the art editor and the layout staff to work at the same time on the same book.

Employers try to convince us that the use of new information and communication technologies will create new jobs, whereas unions are sure of the contrary.

Heinz-Uwe Rübenach, of the Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers (Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger), carried out an inquiry relating to the on-line services and the staff of European newspaper publishers.

"The responses revealed that in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and France there were on average three employees, that is journalists, in each on-line service. These were newly employed people who had not originally come from more conventional newspaper activities. In Germany, an average of six permanent jobs are created per on-line service and roughly five freelance positions as well. There were no jobs lost in publishing houses as a result of the new activities of newspapers in on-line services. These figures, while not totally representative or complete, do indicate a general trend, which is that when newspapers add on-line services to their activities, jobs are created."

However it is difficult to admit that the information society would generate jobs, and it is already stated worldwide that multimedia convergence leads to massive loss of jobs. In the same Symposium, Michel Muller, Secretary-General of the French Federation of Book, Paper and Communication Industry (Fédération des industries du livre, du papier et de la communication), stated that, in France, the graphics industry had lost 20,000 jobs - falling from 110,000 to 90,000 - within the last decade, and that very expensive social plans had been necessary to re-employ those people. He explained:

"If the technological developments really created new jobs, as had been suggested, then it might have been better to invest the money in reliable studies about what jobs were being created and which ones were being lost, rather than in social plans which often created artificial jobs. These studies should highlight the new skills and qualifications in demand as the technological convergence process broke down the barriers between the printing industry, journalism and other vehicles of information. Another problem caused by convergence was the trend towards ownership concentration. A few big groups controlled not only the bulk of the print media, but a wide range of other media, and thus posed a threat to pluralism in expression. Various tax advantages enjoyed by the press today should be re-examined and adapted to the new realities facing the press and multimedia enterprises. Managing all the social and societal issues raised by new technologies required widespread agreement and consensus. Collective agreements were vital, since neither individual negotiations nor the market alone could sufficiently settle these matters."

Quite theoretical compared to the unionists' interventions, the answer of Walter Durling, Director of AT&T Global Information Solutions, was that humanity must not fear technology:

"Technology would not change the core of human relations. More sophisticated means of communicating, new mechanisms for negotiating, and new types of conflicts would all arise, but the relationships between workers and employers themselves would continue to be the same. When film was invented, people had been afraid that it could bring theatre to an end. That has not happened. When television was developed, people had feared that it would do away cinemas, but it had not. One should not be afraid of the future. Fear of the future should not lead us to stifle creativity with regulations. Creativity was needed to generate new employment. The spirit of enterprise had to be reinforced with the new technology in order to create jobs for those who had been displaced. Problems should not be anticipated, but tackled when they arose."

Is it true? People are not so much afraid of the future as they are afraid of losing their jobs. The problem is more the context of a society with a high rate of unemployment, which was not the case when film was invented and television developed. In the information society, what is, and what will be, the percentage of job creations compared to dismissals?

Unions fight worldwide for job creations through investment and innovation, vocational training in the use of new technologies, retraining of workers whose jobs are abolished, fair conditions for the setting-up of contracts and collective conventions, the defense of copyright, a better protection of workers in the artistic field, and the defense of teleworkers as full workers. According to the estimates of the European Commission, there should be 10 million European teleworkers in the year 2000, which would represent 20% of the number of teleworkers worldwide.

Despite all the unions' efforts, will the situation become as tragic as the one described in a report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) suggesting that "in the information age individuals will be 'forced to struggle for survival in an electronic jungle' with 'survival mechanisms' which have been developed over previous decades 's orely tested by change'…"?

In Cyberplanète: notre vie en temps virtuel (Cyberplanet: our life in virtual time) (Paris, Editions Autrement, 1998), Philip Wade et Didier Falkand stated that the United States, Canada and Japan, which are the countries investing the most in new technologies, are also the ones that create the most jobs. A study carried out in February 1997 by Booz.Allen & Hamilton for European Ministers of Industry showed that the European delay has cost one million jobs in 1995 and 1996, because of a technological growth of 2.4% (compared to 9.3% in the United States). According to another study made in January 1997 for the European Commission, 1.3 million jobs could be maintained or created by the European Union between 1997 and 2005. The 300,000 jobs lost in traditional companies would be compensated by 93,000 jobs created by their competitors and 1.2 million jobs created in the sectors of telecommunications, electric and electronic construction, equipment, and distribution of communication products.

Will the traditional distinction between library, publishing house, press publisher or bookstore still exist in a few years? Any writer can create a website, and any website can already create a digital library. More and more libraries, bookstores and publishing houses have no walls, no windows and no shelves. Their premises are their websites, and all the transactions are made on the Web. As for distribution, it is still possible to buy newspapers and magazines at the newsstand or to receive them in the letterbox, but more and more people read them on the Web, and more and more periodicals are "only" electronic.

Will the traditional professional groups (booksellers, editors, librarians, publishers, journalists, etc.) established many years ago stay the same while being more cyberspace-oriented and become cyberlibrarians, cyberpublishers, cyberjournalists, cyberbooksellers, etc.? Or will all these professional tasks be restructured into new professions? With the explosion of the Internet, some information specialists and others decided to move over to companies specialized in computing and the Internet.

Even if information specialists or journalists, for example, convince us they will always be useful, on a general scale the employment trends for the future are far from exciting. Will all the people working in the print media be able to get training and retraining in new technologies, or will they be violently hit by unemployment?

9.4. The Information Society

Jean-Paul, a French musician and writer, wrote in his e-mail of June 21, 1998:

"[…] surfing on the Web operates in rays (I have a centre of interest and I methodically click on all the links included in home pages) or in hops and jumps (from one click to another, as they appear). Of course, it is possible with the print medium. But the difference is striking. So the Internet didn't change my life, but my writing. You don't write the same way for a site as for a script, a play, etc."

He also notes that all the Internet functionalities could already be found in the first Macintosh, which revolutionized the relationship between the user and the information.

"It is not the Internet which changed the way I write, it is the first Mac that I discovered through the self-learning of Hypercard. I still remember how astonished I was during the month when I was learning about buttons, links, surfing by analogies, objects or images. The idea that a simple click on one area of the screen allowed me to open a range of piles of cards, and each card could offer new buttons and each button opened on to a new range, etc. In brief, the learning of everything on the Web that today seems really banal, for me it was a revelation (it seems Steve Jobs and his team had the same shock when they discovered the ancestor of the Mac in the laboratories of Rank Xerox).

Since then I write directly on the screen: I use the print medium only occasionally, to fix up a text, or to give somebody who is allergic to the screen a kind of photograph, something instantaneous, something approximate. It's only an approximation, because print forces us to have a linear relationship: the text is developing page after page (most of the time), whereas the technique of links allows another relationship to the time and the space of the imagination. And, for me, it is above all the opportunity to put into practice this reading/writing 'cycle', whereas leafing through a book gives only an idea - which is vague because the book is not conceived for that."

A very important factor too is the radical change between the book culture and the digital culture. Moving from one to the other as we are doing now deeply changes our relationship to knowledge, because we move from stable information to moving information. During the September 1996 meeting of the International Federation of Information Processing, Dale Spender explained this phenomenon in a very interesting lecture about Creativity and the Computer Education Industry:

"Throughout print culture, information has been contained in books - and this has helped to shape our notion of information. For the information in books stays the same - it endures.

And this has encouraged us to think of information as stable - as a body of knowledge which can be acquired, taught, passed on, memorised, and tested of course.

The very nature of print itself has fostered a sense of truth; truth too is something which stays the same, which endures. And there is no doubt that this stability, this orderliness, has been a major contributor to the huge successes of the industrial age and the scientific revolution. […]

But the digital revolution changes all this. Suddenly it is not the oldest information - the longest lasting information that is the most reliable and useful. It is the very latest information that we now put the most faith in - and which we will pay the most for. […]

Education will be about participating in the production of the latest information. This is why education will have to be ongoing throughout life and work. Every day there will be something new that we will all have to learn. To keep up. To be in the know. To do our jobs. To be members of the digital community. And far from teaching a body of knowledge that will last for life, the new generation of information professionals will be required to search out, add to, critique, 'play with', and daily update information, and to make available the constant changes that are occurring."

The Internet will not do away with the print media, the cinema, the radio or the television. As a new information and communication medium, it is creating its own space while adapting itself to the other media, and vice versa.

From my point of view, the greatest contribution of the Internet to the print media is that people no longer run after information, but that the information is there, available on their screen, and the quantity of this information is really impressive. While, in the beginning, connecting to the Internet was rather complicated for the average user, it has now become simple (for example, with the iMac). One improvement we are all waiting for, however, is a shorter connection time when accessing any website or individual pages we may wish to consult, especially those with many pictures. Let us hope that