Toronto–In medieval times books and their content were precious — worth more than the skin they were written on. As most were religious works they were not only expensive, but sacred. The words on the page were a portal to the words of God. They were therefore “illuminated” with painfully created illustrations from margin to margin. The higher the detail and breath of decoration, the more expensive and important was the work. The creation of a book took years and countless man hours.

Today’s content has taken a very different route: it’s lightweight, stripped of all window dressings. I now read news and other snippets through online news feeds. For those that don’t know, news feeds are a form of delivering content without any form of design, except a very specific hierarchy — basically content with no real medium. This has many advantages within a digital realm, making content smaller and therefore more easily transportable (smaller files move faster on the web).

The other advantage is the repurposing of content across several different mediums. (The same “light” content can be used on a website, cell phone, or digital displays, etc.) The content is filtered through the design on hand. This separation is a fundamental difference in the way content is used and read.

However the craft of designing and illuminating content has been lost in the process. There are beautiful websites that are just as, or possibly more ornate then a medieval manuscript. Regardless, content as a something special, something worth saving, has all but disappeared. Does this reflect the actual value of what we are producing? By shrinking, duplicating, repurposing, and giving up content to be changed by the collective (ie.wikipedia.org) — does this devalue it compared to painstakingly writing and decorating a single page of the script?

My heart says yes, mainly because I admire and enjoy the artistry of nicely packaged book, the feeling of paper, but in the end I still have to argue the opposite. When content becomes a utility, a nearly transparent tool, used every day, in any shape or form, that content has become again just as socially important. This move was seen when Penguin started to produce cheap pocket books for the ‘everyman’ who could at least afford a pack of smokes.

There are barriers to entry to publishing with computers of course, so the economics are slightly different, but the move toward the lightweight is still present. The one quality our digital content doesn’t have is longevity. Today’s artisans of the web expect their craft to die and never be seen in fifty or a hundred years. When someone etched a stone tablet thousands of years ago, they most likely knew it remained long after they had passed on. Is content in one book that will last 2000 years more valuable then 1,000,000 webpages that will remain less than ten?

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Posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 1:15 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.