Evolutions and Revolutions

Michael Jensen | 03/29/2010

As some of you know, I teach graduate courses at George Washington University’s Master’s in Publishing program, and have for years.
Watching the cohorts entering the program, and seeing how they’ve changed, has become a social experiment of its own, for me.

The class this year was team-taught. In the first class, a colleague of mine and I overviewed the “Big Ideas” that we’d be covering in this “Fundamentals of Electronic Publishing” course, among them:

It’s the content not the container
Disintermediation/Decentralization
The end of tyranny of time and space
Scarcity vs. abundance
Value-add through structure and metadata Changes of channels Programmable “smart” content Changes in user expectations Dominance of “standards”

In the second class, I was outlining the changes in the world of publishing of the last 25 years: of going from an information economy of scarcity to one of abundance; from one of defined “channels” to one of interconnected communities; from a rich, biodiverse world of independent bookstores to a virtual monoculture of Barnes & Noble and a threatened Borders; from a robust library economy to one where the entire Philadelphia library system might have closed because of the mayor’s “Plan C” budget in harsh economic times; from a “turn it on”
relationship to technology, to an “always on” relationship to technology.

One of my students raised his hand and asked an important question: is this an evolution or a revolution?

My answer at the time was fairly instant: this is a revolution, because it no longer plays by the rules of its predecessor paradigm.
And in revolutions, the old paradigms get washed away.

I told the story of my multiple visits to Prague, post-Revolution, from 1990-1994, helping publishers understand what (at the time) was “the digital revolution”: desktop computers.

What I saw in 1990 in Czechoslovakia was a well-subsidized publishing culture that produced a rich publishing and reading popular culture.
A variety of visible and invisible translation, print run, distribution, or office expense subsidies made the process of publishing very cheap. In 1990, just about every hardhat and shopkeeper and working human I saw on the tram, the metro, the bus stops, was reading a book. Books were cheap and plentiful.

That was operating on a small-language-nation, social-subsidy publishing paradigm. Subsidies for Czech publishing, because of its small market, was seen by the state to be required, to maintain high national literacy and intellectual vigor.

Naive, robust neo-capitalism changed that. By 1993 and 1994, publishing subsidies had disappeared in all sectors.

And by 1995, a book resided in the hands of only around 10% of the people I saw on the tram, the subway, the bus stop.

It’s a lesson I’ve taken to heart (and written about elsewhere): that revolutions—whether political, cultural, or technological—have unexpected consequences, and that it’s up to us to try to aim them in the best directions. That social goods which we’ve come to expect, aren’t necessarily givens. And that four to five years can radically disrupt particular markets.

After the class, I was chatting with my co-instructor, who comes from the hypercommercial publishing sector. He said to me: “What you say about small language markets requiring subsidies makes sense, but in the English marketplace? What would subsidies subsidize? Who really cares if a publisher goes out of business? The cream will always rise to the top one way or another, after all, right?”

He was talking about a publishing revolution within a cultural revolution—which once started, iterates into some sort of weird fractal system of evolutions happening within revolutions, which ends up…  looking a lot like the workings of an ecosystem. Evolutionary pressures within a changing environment, in the end.

So maybe it’s evolutionary after all, not “merely” a revolution. *Some* of the old rules still apply: know your audience, know your market, promote to the interested, ensure high quality, follow your mission.

To get philosophical: every day’s weather pattern is a revolution (not following the patterns of the previous day) of temperature, wind, sun, rain… which occurs within a season that may be a tiny revolution of its own, within a year that is likely unlike any other in recent biological memory….

But flora and fauna evolve and prosper within that ever-changing, but pattern-persistent, ecosystem, especially if they’re resilient and flexible.

Thus, our jobs as publishers is to be sure we build genetic resilience into our DNA, so that we can survive revolution after evolution after revolution, within the patterns of the changing cultural, political, economic, and technical ecosystem.

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