Post print culture?

The advent of digital communication technology has been often been seen as the end of print culture. Digital communications appear to threaten some core values of print culture such as clear authorship, the perceived stability and fixity of texts, or the habit of following the sustained linear arguments and narratives of books. Digital communications thus appear to threaten our social and consensual models of how information is to be made and agreed, and how knowledge is ordered. In contrast to the triumphalist celebration of print in the nineteenth century, the vast range of contemporary print activity is hidden by the deliberate anonymity of large corporations, and eclipsed by the excitement of digital culture. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that blanket statements such as ‘print is dead’ are still largely rhetorical and speculative. In relation to book use and production, print is still dominant. Additionally, it is important to remember that print culture just about book production. Ephemeral and everyday uses of print have increased in many domains in the digital era: in advertising, in commerce and packaging, and in the office. Copyright, fair use and freedom of information are live issues across ‘print’ and ‘digital’ mediums, as currently, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguments about control versus freedom in the digital realm are complex and increasingly embittered. Potentially corporations and internet providers are in a position to exert much more copyright control over consumers than in recent print periods. All these factors mean that print culture is not dead. With the numbers of informed practitioners, students, interested spectators, and academic historians contributing to this field, print culture as practice, production and discourse about print is evidently not at all dead. In relation to the production of knowledge it is important to assert cultures of print as a contemporary, and not simply a historical phenomenon