A Defense of the Analog

A Manifesto, written by Joseph SchianodiCola, 2019.

I. A Morning Discourse

I once met a design professor who told me that ‘print is dead.’ That may be a rational opinion for some, but it got me pretty vexed.

In the summer of 2018, I temporarily interned at an agency in midtown Manhattan. I sat at a Starbucks countertop one morning, drinking my coffee and getting some work done. A tall, thin man saw what I was doing on my laptop screen and approached me, asking if I was a graphic designer. He was a design professor at Parson’s (I’ll leave his name out, partially for confidentiality, partially because I just cannot remember it for the life of me). Upon telling him I was currently studying design at Boston University, he asked what I’d want to do in the future. I told him rather frankly that I was not too certain, but I did enjoy working with print — posters, editorials, the works. At this, he scoffed. He asked me if I was serious.

I remember feeling as if I was sitting in an interrogation room and someone just turned on a bright desk lamp directly in my face. I reminded him that I was not yet certain what I would be doing in the future, but at this moment, my interests were aligned toward print. He shook his head, “No, no, you got it all wrong. Print? Print is dead, buddy,” said the thin man who I did not consider my buddy. “What makes you say that?” was the only response I could muster.

The thin man and I engaged in a mild debate at the countertop in the midtown Starbucks. Every case of defense for print I brought to the debate was immediately shot down by the thin man’s counterarguments. I imagined that he had already been in the same argument several times. He shot off several examples of digital works that could not have been achieved through print, one being a motion graphics project by designer Ting-An Ho, titled The Motion Type Project. The professor made a fair point, and I, the student, had no rebuttal to his argument. I went to work that day defeated. I started to question if print was really something I had ought to invest interest in. Even now, seven months later, I’m writing this and his argument still vexes me.

First of all, I just gotta say that any professor telling a student that what they are interested in ‘is dead’ and not worth exploring is complete and utter bullshit.

But that’s a different discussion to be had some other time. Second, I think what frustrates me most is that I did not have any viable defense for print at the ready (at the time of this particular debate). I was more or less unprepared, caught off guard. I was sipping my dark roast before work, unaware that I’d soon engage in a heated impromptu discussion over the place printed media has in a digital world. That’s primarily why I’m writing this. Not that no defense for print and the analog has already been made (which will be mentioned later) but rather as a form of retaliation to the thin man and all he stands for, or at least, what he stood for in that Starbucks in 2018.

Call it an overdue, expired act of vengeance, but goddammit I’m going to write it.

II. Plight of the Tactile

One thing I want to make clear at this point in this written piece is that I do not intend to bash, berate, or bad-mouth digital media. I am not trying to slight the work of the digital designers, coders, UX/UI creatives, or anyone else of that sort. Design neither is — nor should be — confined to one particular medium, and should be respected and celebrated across its variety of platforms. I believe digital-based design naturally deserves recognition. However, is not to be exonerated of fault.

The eyes of creatives have been set on the horizon of the digital-scape since the conception of the internet. Today’s innovators continue to experiment in the ever-evolving digital media. New channels, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, 3D sculpting and printing, have been made accessible by digital pioneers. Today’s designer needs to be able to keep up with these digital advancements, and then some. Job applications for graphic designers indicate a preference for those with UX/UI experience, and they almost always require a knowledge of HTML and CSS. A designer who lacks familiarity with the digital is doomed to lose in the cutthroat competition for work.

As for the non-designers, the consumers, the readers, the participants and the targeted audiences (all of which I like to call the designees), they absorb information entirely through the digital sphere. They view social media on their smartphones, news articles on their tablet screens, and novels on their e-books. They encounter innumerous advertisements on any screen reachable by media buyers. [Take a moment, think to yourself reader, about the last time you saw a child of about two or three years using a smart tablet; probably done so with more ease and proficiency than a middle-aged adult, right?] The information the designees consume, be it rooted in fact or fiction, is conveyed through the artificial. The contemporary vernacular is set in RGB and scaled in pixels.

Many believe that we have already adjusted for delivery of information from the blue-lit screen. Courtney Dale of ICM Consulting and Media Corp. believes that print advertisements, for one example, don’t make sense in our dynamic screen environment:

Paper and other static fabrics do not provide the features that the future of advertising will come to depend on. They are heavy, inconvenient, unchangeable, wasteful and ultimately outdated. The moment something is printed, it’s frozen in time. Audiences want to see vivid, immersive, dynamic displays that are time relevant down to the minute[1].

A prediction very much akin to that of the thin man. Audiences are confronted by moving images, responsive displays, and calls-to-action on a daily basis. Television advertisements tend to last 30 seconds; video advertisements on the internet are even shorter. Digital banners, sweeping billboards, and intrusive pop-ups come and go so quickly. Our brains have evolved to metabolize the information they offer and retain whatever is important, to better comprehend our environment in this digital age.

Digital media, if it has not been already made clear (or if it was not already obvious to you, reader), is dominant over print and analog. Thus, many designers have willingly embraced the digital age. From my personal observations, there are certainly some who venture into the digital sphere out of interest in the opportunities digital media makes possible; however, I’ve met more designers who take up digital media more or less for job security. The words of the tall man continue to ring in my ears.

III. Subconscious Preferences

However, before we all fall to our knees and kiss the feet of our new digital overlords, let us not forget that print and analog media are still here, and still contending. People of like mind as the thin man say print is dead, and yet it’s still here, alive and well. Why is that? How come it hasn’t been wiped out of existence yet? One could say that technology just has not yet advanced enough to allow digital media’s coup de grace, a digital replacement that will fulfill the role of print or analog. Another, an advocate of the print and analog, would argue that these media still exist because they have something that digital media doesn’t.

Something is activated when we engage with physical material. Something inside of us chimes, turns on, heightens our interest. Our senses, our natural receptacles of environmental data, trigger something inherent in our hardwiring.

The responses I’m writing of are our natural, instinctive desire to explore and discover, and to organize and control. Creativity and organization, to learn more of something, and then figure out how to wrap your head around that. We do this every time we open a city map, the morning paper, or a new book. In fact, we really do treat reading printed text as interpreting a map. As neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf simply phrases in Proust and the Squid,“Human beings were never born to read.” Our brains lack any neural networks specified or dedicated to reading; rather, our brains appropriate different cerebral regions, dedicated for terrain recognition, for example.[2]

Each time we open a book, for example, we subconsciously consider it’s winding trails. If it’s a book we’ve read before, and are looking for a specific verse, we will remember where it was set on the page, what landmarks were near it, and so on.[3]If it’s a new book, one that we haven’t encountered before, conversely, we consider all the features of the spread: the typography of the text, where the text resides in the spread, the space between lines of text, and letters. We feel the thickness of the pages. We recognize the sound of the pages rubbing together. We entertain the aroma of the book’s material. We sometimes — if the stock of the book allows — gauge what the text reads on the opposite side of the page. Our curiosity is piqued by the newly encountered, and with something with as much detail as a book, we take into account all its features. These tactile features help us build a mental map to familiarize ourselves with the book’s layout, which in turn helps us navigate and metabolize the book’s information. The same curiosity that propels us to explore our environment propels us to assess the format of a page’s information, and how to best collect the information it presents.

Just as much as we humans enjoy exploration, we also enjoy control. With digital media today, one can control, edit, and share text information in mere seconds. However, when compared to print media, our ability to control is only so much, and not so substantial. People find serendipity in having the liberty to manipulate, alter, and even deface the physical material that is the page. In a conducted survey, people report that they “like to have as much control over the text as possible — to highlight with ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins, as well as deform the paper however they choose.[4]” Dog-ears, scribbles, and the occasional tear, are some of the ways in which we can personally and directly engage with the material’s tactility.

This engagement of both our inherent curiosity and our satisfaction with control leaves a strong impression on us as we metabolize information. We exhibit a stronger memory retention when accessing printed or physical media than if we access digital media — a range of our senses are triggered when handling tangible material. On the other hand, there are instances when we create memories, and latch these onto a tangible object. Consider the more familiar channels of print media. Newspapers. Business cards. Books. Movie tickets. Posters. Christmas cards. Billboards. Flyers. Chances are you may have saved one or a few specimens of these before — taped to your wall, wedged in a mirror frame, or stashed in a junk drawer. We find a satisfaction in controlling this material, holding onto and saving what is really an ephemeral object, not meant to last. We, as humans, enjoy keepsakes. We will place great reverence in physical matter, from religious tokens to a movie ticket from a sleepy Saturday night. This is an interesting subversion of the formerly mentioned phenomenon — the strength of the memory being invested in a physical object, rather than the physical object creating the strength of a memory — that also cannot be replicated or surmounted by digital media. This is phenomenon, in my opinion, is the opposite side of the same coin.

Physical media, as made evident, holds a special place in our lives, though it may not seem as such. The tangibility of physical media, and in essence the activation of our senses, is what truly separates physical media from digital media. Our interaction with physical media is proven, not to have more benefits, but to have unique, exclusive benefits than accessing digital media. Print is, most certainly, not dead. In fact, it’s very much alive. We can more than likely credit its survival and prevail in our digital age to our instinctive desires for the tactile: to discover and understand through our senses; to manipulate and organize for our satisfaction’s sake; to imbue value and sentiment into something concrete, for the regard of precious memory.

IV. Remarks for a Thin Man

Well, there. I wrote it. I did the research. I assessed the data. I looked at the graphs. I feverishly explained it to colleagues. Yet, the thin man still sleeps, satisfied with his reality. There will continue to be deniers of the physical. And that’s fine. In fact, its probably necessary. Without discourse against physical media, there would not be a rallying support for the physical media. There would, consequently, not be a place for healthy dialogue regarding such an issue.

Despite every person’s right to their own opinion, however, the outright dismissal of print and the physical as a viable media in today’s age is extremely close-minded. That much may have been apparent from the introduction, but with everything discussed, it’s more glaring than before. For those who still feel that print really is on its way out the door, I would suggest you take a moment and reassess what it is about print that seems so obsolete. Reevaluate what you detest about print, and take into consideration the possibilities made accessible by print. I think it’s important, necessary even, to take into consideration physical media’s ability to develop a human connection, and the lack thereof found in digital media — an advantage that will secure a place for the physical for generations (despite its ephemeral quality.)

[1] Dale, Courtney. “Does Print Still Have A Place In The Future Of Advertising? 10 Experts Weigh In.” Interview. Forbes Communications Council. March 2, 2018. Accessed February 14, 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2018/03/02/does-print-still-have-a-place-in-the-future-of-advertising-10-experts-weigh-in/#4f4d29a35fc6

[2]Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Harper Perennial, 2009.

[3]Rothkopf, Ernst Z. “Incidental Memory for Location of Information in Text.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, vol. 10, no. 6, Dec. 1971, pp. 608–613.

[4]Jabr, Ferris. “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.” Scientific American. April 11, 2013. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/#.