Online Meeting 4

This is really a continuation from last week but I'm placing it here as a starting point for thinking about how we might approach print within our plans for a publication.

The following text is by David Reinfurt . 'This stands as a sketch for the future: Muriel Cooper and the Visible Language Workshop appeared in Dot Dot Dot Fifteen .

' On completing the book, Muriel Cooper made a sixteen millimeter film flipping through its pages to create a stop frame animation. The book's contents shift around the page, defining the grid that structures its design. The Bauhaus book film then became the after image of her design process. It projected out from the hard physical form of the book to suggest a near-future when publishing would be as fluid as film, feedback immediate and users / makers would be all but indistinguishable. '

Talking about how print publishing may be as fluid as film in 1968, Reinfurt talks about immediacy. Immediacy now dominates the way we consume and contribute content, its also a contributing factor in a declining print publishing industry.

Monday's MediaGuardian highlighted the challenges faced by the newspaper publishers as more readers consumed content online. The writer attributed this partly to 'disintermediation by the web' refering to investment from the advertising industry.

Disintermediation

1. In finance, withdrawal of funds from intermediary financial institutions, such as banks and savings and loan associations, in order to invest them directly.

2. Generally, removing the middleman or intermediary.

In relation to print, the web presents a form of disintermediation which has been discussed in previous conversations on this site. Why do we need to collect and information as print when it can be accessed as more direct forms online? What is the role of the designer?

Any publication we make should address this. The example of Muriel Cooper shows how the technology of the near future in 1968 offered to liberate print, the recent report on struggling publishers shows how technology is questioning how we consume content traditionally published as print.

As a group thinking of creating a publication we should think about the process we use to collect and generate dialogue on this site. We have used this forum over the past weeks as a primary source for discussion, before that we have used it as a tool for creating naratives between our individual interests.

This is a source for creating content in a collaborative way.

To take on board the influence of web 2.0 and consider a role for print we should create a publication which consists only of material generated or collected on this or relating sites. The resulting document would examine the use of both web and print based process.