Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Over the weekend, Virginia Heffernan had an article in The New York Times magazine about the TV show Friday Night Lights. She laments the fact that, even thought Friday Night Lights is a great show, it has never become truly popular and never received great ratings. Why not? Well, because it doesn’t have a Web component. It doesn’t offer anything online that gives people the chance to interact (let alone discover) the show or its content. And, in our online age, that’s a no-no. As Heffernan writes:

An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

The same will someday be true for books (if it’s not already). The same way that DVDs come loaded with special features and CDs (when people deign to buy them) come with extra tracks — and now that TV shows also need some sort of added boost — literature will need to adapt as well. Because even if books don’t become digital, and stay analog, society itself has already become electronic. “This is an enormous social shift that coincides with the changeover from analog to digital modes of communication,” writes Heffernan, “the rise of the Internet and the new raucousness of fans.”

This ties into what I call Generation Upload in Print is Dead; the idea that Digital Natives are not content to merely consume content. But Heffernan describes it even better:

As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.

What this will look like for books remains to be seen, but the idea itself will surely remain.