Losing Our Sense of Place

Can a newspaper be a place? How about an album cover?

Lately we've fallen in love with the power of translating everything into bits and bytes and sending them all over the world. This is indeed a great trend, and I love the fact that media are becoming an on-demand thing. TiVo rules.

However, ones and zeroes are not the only way to interact with the world. The thing that's getting lost in all this is a sense of place.

I've been reading a lot about how newspapers are going away, how they are going online, how their business model is dead, and all this. And I agree, the paper is no longer meeting up with people's expectations of news. I'm also not enthralled with the dead tree thing, but that's a separate issue. As a cartoonist, how we get media is really important to me. I love the fact that people all over the world can see my work, at any time.

The thing is, though, a newspaper is like a series of rooms full of content. The articles are placed around, and some have pictures, and some have big headlines, and they are arranged physically in a way that makes sense. Not by keyword, but in real space. Editors do this.

If you look at the Huffington Post online, the only way they have to work with space is to make font sizes really really big or put stuff closer to the top. Or maybe add a picture. It's nowhere near as rich an environment as a physical newspaper. There is, frankly, less information there. It's data more than information.

There's a physicality to reading a newspaper, or a book. Leaning on a wall or holding onto a handle on the train home. Or walking into a bookstore. Bookstore owners, like editors, have a voice and a set of priorities. You can tell what they are about by looking at their front tables. There's physicality to picking up a vinyl record and reading the liner notes or looking at the cover - or, if you can believe this, unfolding the full-size poster from inside. That's retro.

I always cringe a little when I see a new computer program designed to help kids draw. There are things for animating kids' art, making stories, all kinds of things. I am sure many of these are wonderful.

But they miss the physicality of holding the pencil, of smearing charcoal, of moving the paper to just the right angle or moving to a place with different light. No matter what fabulous things are going on on the screen, it is still a screen. And the child is still moving a mouse. Sitting in a chair.
I am very excited about our new on-demand world, and I love interconnectedness. But let's keep it integrated with the dirt world. It affects how we think. We need to help ourselves and our kids interact with physical space. They do it naturally.

My husband thinks in three dimensions. He lays out his ideas in the air with his hands, one after the other. My daughter dances while she talks. We've all heard the jokes about people who can no longer speak if you hold their hands still.

We are physical creatures, and our brains crave that dirt world. I look forward to a time when our bits and bytes can integrate better with it. The Kindle is kind of a good start, I think. I've made a couple of books for it, so people can read them on their Kindle or iPhone as they move around in the world. I hope that intersection grows tremendously in the future, so we can have interconnectedness and a sense of place at the same time.