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Why communicators should cling to newspapers and magazines
08 November 2022
This month I read, for the first time, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. I know right! Most people read it during their rebellious teenage phase.
This week, I also attended Advanced Engineering, where I had several conversations about the future of publishing. My view is that, while from a marketing perspective, I’m most excited by a data-driven model with inherent opportunities for my clients to reach their readers on a personal scale, print is still a vital medium.
So, what does this have to do with A Clockwork Orange? Famously described as a ‘gruesomely witty cautionary tale’ by Time magazine, do you know the first thing Burgess cautions us about in the book?
People have stopped reading newspapers
He writes, in his first paragraph as his central character enters a café of sorts, “The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things change so skorry these days and everybody quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.”
Burgess is telling us, right off the bat, that one of the causes of the dystopia we are about to enter is the lack of attention to what his happening in the world and lack of attention to thoughtful media.
Orwell’s 1984 is similar, with an entire records department devoted to managing the news and media. He describes it as follows; “Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology”.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, newspapers are produced separately for different castes of person to help control their though and beliefs – one for the dronelike Deltas, one for the upper cast and one for middle class Gammas. All state controlled, with the most slave-like characters, the Epsilons, unable to read.
This doesn’t apply to trade magazines though!
This argument, while lofty, doesn’t apply to trade magazines surely? These writers were talking about the influencing of moral and ethical thought, not the combination of edge and cloud devices required for the perfect connected factory.
But it really does. Have you ever googled, ‘please change my mind about what robot to buy’? Have you ever opened your favourite email newsletter expecting to have the echo chamber of technical opinion your share with it challenged? Unlikely.
On a more visceral note, have you ever Googled, “is there any point integrating a CHP programme, which uses gas as an energy resource, given that 2050 is only 28 years away?”
Probably not, because none of us want to hear answers that conflict with our intentions.
What happens next?
But why does dystopian fiction have this, almost universal, obsession with newspapers and magazines? Are we being warned by the novelists of the twentieth century about how our thoughts could be controlled in years to come?
Too simple. Particularly as it applies to the grand tradition of trade, scientific and technical publishing.
I think the real answer might lie in an essay that Ursula K Le Guin wrote about her own prescient novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. “The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists… is not to predict the future, but to describe reality, the present world.
“Science Fiction is not predictive, it is descriptive.”
This is equally true in the world of automation. How many motors in variable speed applications still lack VSDs to reduce their energy consumption? How many engineers Google, “should I break my capital budget to fit VSDs across the board, saving energy and opex, or should I retain the status quo of my plant exactly as it?”
And that is why, if we want to change minds, we must cling to newspapers and magazines as a medium of communication. Nothing else can achieve the same effect.
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