The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)
I sometimes chat with people in the book- and magazine-publishing industries. They complain to me about the web. They worry about what is being lost. They can sound like this bookseller in Buffalo, New York:
I call the people who say such things the Gutenbourgeois. They believe in the cultural primacy of writers and editors and they feel good—even a bit superior—about working in publishing. They believe it is their job to drive culture forward. The web, they are a little proud to admit, confuses them. They say: “We gave away all those short stories on our website but it sold no books.” Or: “We built a promo site for our famous author who does the crime novels and it was just a total boondoggle with no traffic.” Or: “The magazine can't get enough pageviews, even after we hired the famous blogger. Now management wants to make people pay for access.”
One can spend a lot of time defining a medium in terms of how it looks, what it transmits, wavelengths used, typographic choices made, bandwidth available. I like to think about media in terms of questions answered.
