Mad as he is, there was a cool logic in the demand by the Unabomber to have his 35,000-word manifesto in The Washington Post and the New York Times .
It has been described as a diatribe against industrial society. It is now available on the Internet. The Unabomber … as the FBI have named him … could have put it on the Internet himself and made it available to 30 million people, but it might have led to his discovery. Even so, it would not have been as satisfactory as getting it in The Washington Post and The New York Times. This is because there is a stamp of authority about these papers.
That authority in this instance was somewhat diluted by the fact that the papers were under some duress to publish. The Unabomber has killed half a dozen people … mostly scientists and industrialists with elaborate home-made bombs in the past decade. The duress arose because the Unabomber had agreed to stop his bombing campaign against people (but not property) if they did publish and continue it if they did not. None the less, the papers could still have refused.
The Unabomber did not merely want distribution of his manifesto, but also wanted the imprimatur of these august journals.
I use the word imprimatur deliberately. Generally it means stamp of approval or identity. Strictly it is Latin for “”let it be printed”. From the mid-17th century, the Roman Catholic Church required permission from a bishop for the printing of any theological work. The imprimatur was that permission. It meant the works did not offend church teaching and that they had approval.
The imprimatur was a creature of the invention of printing. Before printing presses, the circulation of hand-written works were fairly limited and therefore of little political consequence. After it, approval for printing and publication was demanded lest readers get the wrong idea.
In the 18th century, printing presses got more efficient and more widespread. Pamphlets and newspapers sprang up. Eventually neither the state nor the church could demand their imprimatur. Nor could the state prohibit publication (with some limited exceptions). There was a fusion of publisher, printer, distributor and author under one roof. A corporation or individual owns the presses, employs the writers and controls (directly or indirectly) the content. The act of publication and the act of printing were fused and have been barely distinguishable for two centuries. That is now changing.
The conduct of the Unabomber highlights the distinction between the publication function, on one hand, and that of printing and distribution on the other.
Nowadays, with modern computing and the Internet, anyone can distribute anything … words, pictures and sound … to millions of people worldwide. Moreover, distribution will get easier and wider as computers get easier to use, modems get faster and cables can carry more and every home industrial world gets them.
But the trouble is that much of the material on the Internet is rubbish … white noise. As time goes on, the millions of subscribers will increasingly want to separate the white noise from the good material. A human can only absorb so much per day … say, 300,000 words or 16 hours of sound and pictures. Thousands of times that amount is going on to the Internet each day.
It means that the new market will be not in the distribution (the old printing) of material, but in the act of publishing … the placing of the imprimatur. This will separate the white noise from good material. People will pay for the imprimatur.
Thus an organisation that puts in the intellectual and economic effort in attracting and paying people to produce good material (words, sounds and pictures) and vetting and presenting it will still be rewarded even if the “”printing” and distribution of it can be done very cheaply indeed through electronic means into the home.
In the new electronic regime, the act of publication then becomes more economically and socially important that the act of “”printing” in the old regime. To illustrate the distinction: these very words, for example, are more than just the printed ravings of Crispin Hull. They have the stamp … the imprimatur … of The Canberra Times on them. In a totally electronic age, they would still carry that imprimatur and people would pay to access them … presuming, of course, that electronic publishing does not have some method of precisely counting reader response to individual writers and I have not been exposed as a mere white-noise raver not worth the imprimatur of The Canberra Times masthead.
Present newspaper organisations will, one hopes, keep and improve their purely publishing function even if the old printing and distribution using paper diminishes in importance.
Many people may well prefer a paper version to receive their news, commentary and other information for a long time to come or indefinitely. “”People will always want the paper version to read while they are sitting on the dunny or eating breakfast.” True. But will they be prepared to pay for its true unsubsidised cost if advertisers start to move way from paper distribution to electronic? For example, the Yellow and White Pages are both on the Internet, and before long Telstra will no doubt offer hypertext linking (computerspeak for click on a button for more information) that can be updated weekly or daily with, say, this week’s specials. At present the market for that is very small, but it is growing. Virtually every computer comes with a modem. Australia’s Yellow Pages will be updated daily and be available in every home. Display advertising in newspapers will clearly be threatened. (Or am I the only brontosaurus taking a more than passing interest in the little furry creatures running around our ankles?)
It means newspapers will have to improve the quality of their publication. Deciding what to leave out will be more important than deciding what to put in. No longer will the question be: “”What are the best 200,000 words of material to fit in the paper space between the advertisements?” … irrespective of whether some rubbish squeezes in under the 200,000 word paper limit or whether some excellent material gets left out because it happens to be over the limit. The question will only be: “”Is this material good enough for The Canberra Times?” Or New York Times, or Washington Post.
The publishing task will be to acknowledge that the readers’ time is precious, and to guide the reader quickly through a great quantity of quality material. The publishers that do that well will survive.
It means capitalising on the present talent that resides in the selectors, editors and presenters of material, as well as … more obviously … the producers.
Let’s take the Unabomber example forward a decade or so, when there might not be paper versions of The New York Times and The Washington Post. He would still want to be included in their electronic version even if it would be open to him to publish himself in secure anonymity under his own pseudonym to potentially the same audience over the electronic network.
This is because being distributed under the masthead or imprimatur of The New York Times and The Washington Post means something beyond their present capacity merely to reach a wide audience by printing a lot of copies and distributing them throughout a nation.
This is why there was such wide debate and even anger at what the newspapers did. The newspapers have denied it, but they gave credibility and substance to the manifesto. They did not merely print and distribute it. They published it.