The digital myth

Increasingly, we live in an online world. We need to communicate instantly, quickly, incessantly. We all love, and increasingly need, our phones. Facebook. Messaging. Twitter. Texts. Everything that keeps us in touch quickly and easily with the people we love, and with those who are most important to us.

But we also yearn for some permanence. While our phones, emails, texts, and our apps give us instant gratification – we know we need more. We long too for the slower life, the slower read. For the joy of holding other people’s thoughts and feelings in our hand. The pleasure of having a good book with us, or a beautifully designed and printed magazine, or a small booklet about a place or experience that we are fond of. Running our fingers over the pages. Dwelling on them. Knowing that those ideas, those thoughts,  those feelings will be there again for us after we have put them down. Because we really own them. In printed form, they are ours.

We love digital communications too, but there is also a kind of terror. The fear of not always being part of a majority that is ‘moving on’, away from permanence, and towards constant instability. The fear of being left behind in a world that goes seemingly ever faster.

Digital. Online. Instant. Connected. Included. We love it. But we also hate it. We feel drawn to it like a drug. We know we need some of these drugs to keep us alive in this world. But we also know  that these drugs – or, at least, too much of them, too frequently – can also kill us, kill our feelings, our sense of space, our freedom to choose – to be ourselves.

Some of us. Most of us. All of us, probably, need something else. Or some things else. Those ‘somethings’  are so often the beautiful printed objects that are printed, and bound. Stitched together. Finished with silky effects. Or gloss touches. The things give us insight into the world, but also give us time to reflect. That we can keep on our shelves around us for the rest of our lives. That we can share with those who are physically present with us, face to face.

We need to celebrate print, in all its shapes and forms. Those who love print, (and I think that’s almost every one of us – even if only secretly), must shout loud about why it means so much to us, and does us so much good. And we must fight the myth – the bullying consensus – that all that’s digital is good. That we all have to ditch everything in print in favour of digital, every time. That we all have to “get with it” and “move on”, and go online with absolutely every form of communication.

Print gives us power. Power to stand aside, and take our time. To inhabit a space to be ourselves.