Ink into Bits: A Web of Converging Media

Citation

Duff, A.S. (1999), "Ink into Bits: A Web of Converging Media", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 4, pp. 330-331. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.4.330.1

Charles T. Meadow is professor emeritus at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. He has long been a thinker of note, ranking near Samuel C. Bradford and Brian C. Vickery in the latest citation ratings of information sciences (White and McCain, 1998). His main field is, or was, online information retrieval, but in the work under review his subject is very much more ambitious, namely the development of electronic media and their social, economic and educational impact. Happily, the result is a successful all‐round introduction to electronic publishing.

The author speaks of the “giant melting pot” into which digitisation seems to be forcing a wide range of industries. Computers are turning into televisions, telephone lines into publishing mechanisms, books into hypertexts. Media which were formerly wholly self‐contained have begun to merge with one another, with frightening ramifications for all concerned. This phenomenon may not have the “immediacy of wars, pestilence, and poverty”, but “in the long run”, Meadow argues, “[it] might be just as important in terms of what [it] does to our civilisation”. He sets the context by reviewing the history of all kinds of media, while trying to register, to quote the title of Chapter 4, “The special place of books and writing in our culture”. Another helpful early chapter expounds an important distinction between the representation of information and its presentation, where the former refers to fundamental categories like sound or text and the latter to the infinitely varied ways in which these can be expressed: for example, the word “Hello” is a textual representation of a Ñgreeting, one which can be presented in any number of fonts. Meadow′s discussion here may be recommended to anyone seeking a demystification of the technicalities behind the concept of media convergence.

Subsequent chapters address all of the live areas in electronic publishing studies, such as linear text versus hypertext (the author himself is very pro‐hypertext), human‐computer interaction, multimedia, the information superhighway, distribution mechanisms, the rate of adoption of technological innovations, markets, consumer protection, and futurology. Unusually for an information studies academic, Meadow is as at home talking about television, cellular telephones, or the movies, as he is on the subject of computers and their technological offspring. His philosophical speculations on these topics, although hardly original, are always interesting. He certainly has a gift, only occasionally degenerating into a faintly patronising mode, for explaining technical matters to the non‐technical reader ‐‐ the section on The Electromagnetic Spectrum being a fine example. He is also proficient in the economic and marketing sides of electronic publishing, another strong reason why this book could prove (at least if the price were lower) particularly serviceable as a student text for electronic publishing courses. An appendix containing nearly 20 pages of up‐to‐date statistical charts and a list of recommended reading further increase its attractiveness in that respect.

Obviously, imperfections can be found. There are many typographical errors, perhaps more than is really acceptable from an important publisher like The Scarecrow Press (one bibliographic citation on p. 271 contains three typos!). There are a few plain inaccuracies, such as the attribution of a famous cave metaphor to Aristotle (p. 863: it actually originates much earlier, in Plato′s Republic). There is also too much repetition, notwithstanding the author′s own observation that repetition can be pedagogically effective (this is surely more appropriate to oral than to written communication). The strong North American flavouring, especially the incessant baseball analogies, will be a mild irritant to the rest of the world. More substantively, it is arguable that Meadow aligns himself somewhat too closely with the convergence thesis, overrating the potential of multimedia, and underestimating the ethical and social problems implicit in the “drive toward an all‐digital, fully compatible world”. But, overall,< Ink into Bits is an extremely “user‐friendly” electronic publishing primer likely to be of considerable interest to undergraduates, librarians, and the general reader.