Print in the Communication Ecology

It's like a galaxy.


It's like an embryo.


It's also like a pencil.

Humans live in activity space.
Activity space is physical space and information space.
The internet is the world's information space.
Information strings connect natural and built activity spaces.

The Screen is a physical window into information space.
Print is a physical window into information space.
The computer screen is in real time.
Print lives outside of time.

Exchanges connect activity spaces.
Information space becomes more articulated.
That's the ecology of money. That's the GDP.
That's Wall Street.

Exchanges connect activity spaces
Physical space becomes more articulated.
That's the ecology of real life.
Machinery, communities, people and the real economy.

Repeated exchanges create threads.
Bundles of threads create strings.
Tensions on strings organize new spaces.
New spaces disrupt and integrate with old spaces.

Time and motion are are full of noise.
When motion stops, some of the noise stops.
Outside of time, some of the noise stops.
A signal can make it through.

Books? Newspapers? Posters?

Are the best ways to capture the Other's logical narrative.
Logical narratives become lenses.
Lenses separate signal from noise.
Using different lenses is the most hopeful way of predicting the future.

Having a narrative is an operational definition of being human.
Control of logical narratives is an operational definition of smart.
Time and space are the independent variables.
Everything else is signal and noise.

In a recent thread over at The PrintCEO Blog Andy M said "Like a cartoon that appeared in a recent MAN Roland publication - two Gen-Y-ers looking at a newspaper and one says “Hey this is really cool - they’ve downloaded everything and printed it out for us!”

In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman says "Typography has the strongest possible bias towards exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially: a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response."

Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network Society, says, ". . .TV appeals to the associate/lyrical minds, not involving the psychological effort of information retrieving and analyzing. . . .While print favors systematic exposition, TV is best suited to casual conversation. "
I say, "The internet is interactive TV + search"

What is a Publishing Center ?