Change—and Permanence

I was out and about Wednesday morning, and I saw right away that the morning papers were getting snapped up. What, even today? The daily paper is fading away like the Cheshire Cat, but on this particular day, it was a hot commodity. And of course, I was hardly surprised.

Clearly there are some messages for which a certain medium is preferable. Years ago, working for a reading teachers' professional group, I wrote an article about calligraphy. I was inspired to do that because some weeks before I had been looking for something at the supermarket, and noticed there were calligraphy pens available there. Calligraphy pens! Evidently they were a commodity that people might want any day, like cornflakes or lightbulbs. Why?

Well, I soon found out that people used them for wedding invitations. And they used them to write mottos and sayings to frame and put on the wall. In short, people were using those calligraphy pens for messages they felt were important. And it dawned on me that we've seen a vast explosion in ways to communicate, but most of those new media are utterly ephemeral—the messages can go poof, just like that. Years ago, if someone wrote you a love letter, you could put it in a drawer, and if the house didn't burn down you would have it pretty much forever. An e-mail on a hard drive? Not the same at all.

The things we really think are important are literally written in stone, of course, or metal. Then there's print—less permanent, but at least concrete, and durable enough if treated well. And then you have the electronic media. For those of us who've adapted to the new media environment or never really knew the old one in the first place, the electronic media do fine most of the time. But Wednesday, as historian Simon Schama said in The Telegraph, people wanted a newspaper because "you can't frame a digital image and a printout doesn't say 'History' in the way a print headline does."

It's strange. I used to work for newspapers, and hated to watch them fade, but I'm used to it now. I don't get a newspaper at home, and only rarely buy them. I learn about the world beyond my senses via the Web. But we all wanted a paper Wednesday morning, to hold a tangible object in our hands and feel that in doing so we could slow time, we could linger over a moment that felt special and important. I know the daily newspaper is soon to be history itself, and I've embraced the new world of information management and the many, many benefits it offers. But once newspapers are gone, what will we do the next time we sense history in the making, and feel the impulse to go out and buy a paper? I honestly have no idea.