PIXEL PROPHET
PIXEL PROPHET
BRAVE NEW WORLD
As we struggle out of the lockdown and start to come to terms with what may be a whole new way of working, it may be a good time to review where we are going as a print on demand service, and some of the clues may be in how we have adapted to changing times over the last decades. Martin Christie returns from furlough.
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ong before the internet became a real commercial threat, people working at home, with a brand new PC and an A4 printer, were predicted to herald the end of over-the-counter printing. More recently, the 3D printer was expected to be in everyone’s house so that rather than buy anything, people would just make it themselves. Well, life is never as simple as the pundits predict and, as we know, merely buying a printer – any printer – is the easy bit. Making it work properly, servicing it and feeding it, well that’s where it gets a lot more complicated. So now more people will be working from home through necessity, in a brand new virtual world that would have been science fantasy even ten years ago, meeting in computer chat rooms, collaborating in cyberspace. It may be a practical solution short term if large numbers of office workers can no longer be accommodated in close quarters and businesses may be attracted to potential savings in high city centre rents. But is it sustainable in the longer term when the full implications of the changes have not been thought through? There may be more at risk than the loss of the business lunch. People are social by nature, and society has developed by co-operation and personal interaction. We also learn from that close contact through observation and example and, in so many ways, pick up pointers from each other, which were not directly sought or expected. This process of serendipity has been very central to human progress since one caveman watched another banging rocks together and thought of a way of making basic tools. Thinking outside of the box, rather than being constrained by it, is the key to evolution at every level. But is that going to be encouraged, or even allowed, in an environment that sees what it wants to see, and shows what it wants to show. Group chats with long-lost relatives may be fine to exchange news and gossip without the inconvenience of actually meeting them, but it may not be ideal for a progressive, forwardlooking working environment, where you may only meet the people in your group. One of the limitations of the internet is you only find what you are looking for, and this selfconfirming circle can produce quite negative results. We know from over-the-counter experience that a good number of customers 14
We know from over-the-counter experience that a good number of customers don’t really know what they want, which is why they prefer to come face to face with a professional who can advise and point them in the right direction don’t really know what they want, which is why they prefer to come face to face with a professional who can advise and point them in the right direction. While it’s great to have so much information at your fingertips, if you don’t know which button to push it’s like taking a stab in the dark, and picking things that you can’t actually see and touch is potentially flawed as we already know through experience. In a world when we are supposedly trying to cut down unnecessary journeys, it is perfect madness to have a large percentage of delivered goods returned as a matter of course. Even working from home, office workers will still need goods and services delivered somewhere as there are still plenty of things that cannot be provided by purely digital information. The often predicted demise of paper is still a long way off, and while the specifications may be changing, the need for hard copy is still very much with us. One of the reasons is that information still needs to be recorded and preserved so it can be kept and shared over time, not just with the temporary members of a chat room. Printed papers have been with us and preserved for centuries and handwritten manuscripts for many centuries before that. Digital information has no such track record, and many experts fear it may prove to be far more fragile. An ancient Persian King once asked his wise men to construct a phrase he could use that would always be true. After much deliberation, they come up with the adage this too shall pass away. Possibly the world’s first recorded sound bite, this prediction has now been updated for the digital world by one the internet’s wise heads, Vint Cerf, currently a vice president at Google. He is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost as hardware
and software becomes obsolete. Cerf fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a “digital Dark Age”. Old formats of documents that we’ve created or presentations may not be readable by the latest version of the software because backwards compatibility is not always guaranteed. “And so what can happen over time is that even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may not actually know what it is.” This revelation may have shocked the cyber geeks who had no idea that their electronic world could crumble into dust as well as the temples of ancient civilisations. But it won’t surprise anyone who has worked in the printon-demand industry during the last decades, nor regular readers of this column. The days when hard copies of originals could be stacked in a drawer for future use are long gone. Backing up and storing all the vast amounts of digital information in different file formats is enough of a challenge, but there is also the problem that you still have to sort through it all to find anything. It’s surprising how quickly the general public has accepted digital information without question, and more worrying that it is assumed to be indestructible. The fact that they will commit valuable items, and even entire life history to small pieces of metal and plastic, reveals a faith in technology which is way beyond actual reliability. Backing up files and photos on discs and hard drives is good practice, and seems a bit like an insurance policy, but you are still hedging your bets on the likelihood of any one of them failing. The continual deterioration of digital files through saving and transfer is a potential nightmare described as data rot. And, as nobody has any form of digital format older than fifty years, no one really knows if it will survive more than a generation. SEPTEMBER 2020 • QUICK PRINT PRO
