Newspapers and My Ideal Spime

I was thinking about newspapers today. Ordinary, pervasive, everyday things. They're almost an icon of normalcy, like cars and houses boxes of milk, things real and tangible in a world increasingly driven by unreal and intangible things. The things that actually shape our lives at this point in time are not real at all: Emails, bands, ideologies, credit card transactions, voice and text from our cell phones. There's no substance or form to these, they're only nouns by convention. What is an email? A lot of microscopic fluctuations in a magnetic field on the surface of an aluminum disc? Bursted, multiplexed dance on the surface of a carrier wave, existing only instantaneously as it flies right across the globe, into space and back again. If you give it substance by printing it on paper is it still an email, or just the text of an email, a rendering, like a photograph can be a rendering of a face, but isn't the face itself? I don't know. It's doubtful that the otherworldly magic of our technology can be readily understood in the traditional nouns and verbs of human languages that have developed over millennia to communicate the realities of the physical world.

That's why technology is still magic. The uncommon knowledge, jargon and whole technical languages used to work with computers are not very different to the forbidden knowledge of the occult and unintelligible incantation of spells that was widely believed to be the realm of magic not so very long ago. Witchcraft and black magic are still widely feared in much of the developing world by people educated and westernized enough to know better. I think for many ordinary people feeling of stigma and unknowability of the occult has been inherited by the technology.

A hacker writes a script to enter the CCTV system of a building on the other side of the world. He composes several verses in an esoteric language, written in a special, concise way, literally commanding mysterious and distant forces to summon an image of a faraway place into a piece of glass in front of him. The only difference between the hacker and a wizard chanting over a crystal ball is that the hacker actually has the power the wizard was imagined to have. The same is true of the geneticist mage creating plants and animals with supernatural properties, for the way the chemist mixes up drops and vials of things to make liquids that cure disease or make water safe to drink. It's all sorcery to most people. (continues after the jump)

But newspapers are real. So real and ordinary, in fact, that we forget how strange and anachronistic the idea of newspapers is. We cut down trees, at great cost to environment, mush them up with chemicals (that also go into the environment) using energy that mostly comes from our finite supply of fossil fuels, dry the mush into sheets and print words and pictures on it. Then a huge and intricate distribution system consumes the time of thousands of people and burns a bunch more fossil fuels to rush neat stacks of dead tree around the globe, by which time the news is already hours old. The printed words are then skimmed over once, if at all, by a half-interested person who then throws the whole lot away, creating a disposal problem for millions of tons of dead tree. WTF? Is this really 2006?

There reason at all why we should be paying for the effort and waste for cutting down all these trees and shipping stale news around the world. Much of what is in newspapers isn't even news, it's ads no-one wants to see, meaningless drivel, wonky political rants and pictures of boobies. A lot like the internet, really. Suppose a newspaper costs one dollar and I buy one every day for a year, $356.00. Half that money could pay for an electronic device that cuts out the need for physical distribution entirely, and does a lot of other things besides.

The device I have in mind is the same size as a magazine, about as thick and heavy as an edition of Vogue or FHM. It folds open like a book and one side is taken up by a screen that isn't shiny, a neutral matte surface. I'm not talking about a laptop computer: delicate, fiddly plastic things you can't bash around or get water on. This is solid aluminum, maybe with a tasteful leather or canvas cover on the outside, reminiscent of an elegant, Victorian object. It shuts with a latch or a buckle. On the inside surface opposite the screen should be a big touch pad and four or five buttons with dual markings [play/on-off] [pause/email] [ff/phone] [rew/news].

The big touch pad is for moving a cursor, like the pokey little 'mouse' touchpads on laptops but big enough to use without getting carpel tunnel syndrome, taking up most of the area on the left inside of the device. The touch pad is also used for writing, in big shorthand runes traced with fingertips. Styluses are silly, because writing takes too long, and miniature keyboards are horrible to use. Two fingers stroked vertically down the pad for 'the', three for 'and', two fingers vertically down the pad followed by a tap in the bottom left for 'these', tap in the bottom right for 'them'. You get the idea. The extended Roman alphabet retains its meaning for people still learning the shorthand. Tracing letters with your finger isn't much slower than typing for the folk you see pecking away at keyboards with two fingers. With practice I think the big touchpad will be a least as efficient a way to enter text as typing is, and more ergonomic.

Other technical features: 500mhz or so processor, a small camera for VOIP (Skype) video chat, bluetooth chip for bluetooth headset (small, clips inside the device), solid state hard drive, a flash card reader (DVDs are on their way out just as newspapers are), a WiFi/TV/Radio aerial (behind the touch pad) and a cellphone antenna for where WiFi is not available. All the electronics are on a single, solid board. I expect to be able to throw this across the room without breaking it. No moving parts besides the sturdy metal hinge. Most of its weight is aluminum panel and battery.

Above all, it must be easy to use. How to work it should be obvious, not intuitive. No waiting for it to boot up. I would expect my grandmother to be able to pick it up without any explanation for most features, save the use of the touch pad. It's used like a book, reading from the right hand page, portrait orientation unlike laptops, which are landscape oriented, wasting a lot of space on text screen, people pay very little attention to the edges of web pages, we process bodies of text vertically. The unit can be turned ninety degrees for watching television and movies. Portrait is better for teleconferencing with a single person. Teleconferencing is done using the bluetooth headset and camera, positioning the device about two feet in front if the user's face, like a window between two points in the real world.

All this technology already exists and has been mass produced to the point where it's very affordable. Solid state camera $5, solid state drive $10, bluetooth/WiFi chip $3, Linux OS and software FREE!, total cost per unit under a hundred dollars. So why are we still buying newspapers? Inertia, I think. Anachronisms or not, people are comfortable with newspapers, they're part of our race memory. Most of us can imagine with no difficulty at all a paper boy in the 1940s excitedly shouting out the news that the war had ended, even though I've never seen a child in the street shouting news headlines it doesn't seem strange.

People don't worry that their newspaper is spying on them, or that they can't understand how to work their newspaper like they do about current generation cellphones. Email and video chat still have the frightening touch of black magic about them, hundreds of years of burning witches leaves a mark on society. This is why the device must be so simple, and not look or handle too much like a computer. It's no more difficult or mysterious to address an envelope than it is to address an email, but you come across people who obstinately state that they 'just don't understand' computers, and on those grounds won't try to learn email or text messaging. People like that aren't intimidated by the post, they can imagine a letter being delivered, they understand how the postal system works. They don't understand how email magically flashes around the world, and don't want you to try explain. They're afraid of learning the magic and see reading from a screen as being overcomplicated. If using the device is made simple enough, functions cut down to a minimum (no endless menus of features) I think this fear can be sidestepped.

If I were a newspaper owner, I would be rushing to do this, and give the devices away free with subscriptions. WiFi is everywhere and there is so much opportunity to sell online content. With this hardware you could sell consumers long distance phone calls and video chats, movie rentals, TV channels, radio shows, huge libraries of books, video games, and all manner of other things for a fraction of what most people pay for them today. Cut a deal with Amazon and EBay and you're already looking at making a hefty profit in commissions from the things, control the portal through which consumers receive information and you're immediately middleman to everyone that has any kind of content or product for sale. Incentive, no?