make-up, which eliminated the need for rekeying and shifted preliminary
typesetting functions from the production to the editorial staff. In book
publishing, digitization has speeded up the editorial process, which used to be
sequential, by allowing the copy editor, the art editor and the layout staff to
work at the same time on the same book.
Employers try to convince us that the use of new information and communication
technologies will create new jobs, whereas unions are sure of the contrary.
Heinz-Uwe Rübenach, of the Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers
(Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger), carried out an inquiry relating to
the on-line services and the staff of European newspaper publishers.
"The responses revealed that in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and
France there were on average three employees, that is journalists, in each
on-line service. These were newly employed people who had not originally come
from more conventional newspaper activities. In Germany, an average of six
permanent jobs are created per on-line service and roughly five freelance
positions as well. There were no jobs lost in publishing houses as a result of
the new activities of newspapers in on-line services. These figures, while not
totally representative or complete, do indicate a general trend, which is that
when newspapers add on-line services to their activities, jobs are created."
However it is difficult to admit that the information society would generate
jobs, and it is already stated worldwide that multimedia convergence leads to
massive loss of jobs. In the same Symposium, Michel Muller, Secretary-General of
the French Federation of Book, Paper and Communication Industry (Fédération des
industries du livre, du papier et de la communication), stated that, in France,
the graphics industry had lost 20,000 jobs - falling from 110,000 to 90,000 -
within the last decade, and that very expensive social plans had been necessary
to re-employ those people. He explained:
"If the technological developments really created new jobs, as had been
suggested, then it might have been better to invest the money in reliable
studies about what jobs were being created and which ones were being lost,
rather than in social plans which often created artificial jobs. These studies
should highlight the new skills and qualifications in demand as the
technological convergence process broke down the barriers between the printing
industry, journalism and other vehicles of information. Another problem caused
by convergence was the trend towards ownership concentration. A few big groups
controlled not only the bulk of the print media, but a wide range of other
media, and thus posed a threat to pluralism in expression. Various tax
advantages enjoyed by the press today should be re-examined and adapted to the
new realities facing the press and multimedia enterprises. Managing all the
social and societal issues raised by new technologies required widespread
agreement and consensus. Collective agreements were vital, since neither
individual negotiations nor the market alone could sufficiently settle these
matters."
Quite theoretical compared to the unionists' interventions, the answer of Walter
Durling, Director of AT&T Global Information Solutions, was that humanity must
not fear technology:
"Technology would not change the core of human relations. More sophisticated
means of communicating, new mechanisms for negotiating, and new types of
conflicts would all arise, but the relationships between workers and employers
themselves would continue to be the same. When film was invented, people had
been afraid that it could bring theatre to an end. That has not happened. When
television was developed, people had feared that it would do away cinemas, but
it had not. One should not be afraid of the future. Fear of the future should
not lead us to stifle creativity with regulations. Creativity was needed to
generate new employment. The spirit of enterprise had to be reinforced with the
new technology in order to create jobs for those who had been displaced.
Problems should not be anticipated, but tackled when they arose."
Is it true? People are not so much afraid of the future as they are afraid of
losing their jobs. The problem is more the context of a society with a high rate
of unemployment, which was not the case when film was invented and television
developed. In the information society, what is, and what will be, the percentage
of job creations compared to dismissals?
Unions fight worldwide for job creations through investment and innovation,
vocational training in the use of new technologies, retraining of workers whose
jobs are abolished, fair conditions for the setting-up of contracts and
collective conventions, the defense of copyright, a better protection of workers
in the artistic field, and the defense of teleworkers as full workers. According
to the estimates of the European Commission, there should be 10 million European
teleworkers in the year 2000, which would represent 20% of the number of
teleworkers worldwide.
Despite all the unions' efforts, will the situation become as tragic as the one
described in a report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) suggesting
that "in the information age individuals will be 'forced to struggle for
survival in an electronic jungle' with 'survival mechanisms' which have been
developed over previous decades 's orely tested by change'..."?
In Cyberplanète: notre vie en temps virtuel (Cyberplanet: our life in virtual
time) (Paris, Editions Autrement, 1998), Philip Wade et Didier Falkand stated
that the United States, Canada and Japan, which are the countries investing the
most in new technologies, are also the ones that create the most jobs. A study
carried out in February 1997 by Booz.Allen & Hamilton for European Ministers of
Industry showed that the European delay has cost one million jobs in 1995 and
1996, because of a technological growth of 2.4% (compared to 9.3% in the United
States). According to another study made in January 1997 for the European
Commission, 1.3 million jobs could be maintained or created by the European
Union between 1997 and 2005. The 300,000 jobs lost in traditional companies
would be compensated by 93,000 jobs created by their competitors and 1.2 million
jobs created in the sectors of telecommunications, electric and electronic
construction, equipment, and distribution of communication products.
Will the traditional distinction between library, publishing house, press
publisher or bookstore still exist in a few years? Any writer can create a
website, and any website can already create a digital library. More and more
libraries, bookstores and publishing houses have no walls, no windows and no
shelves. Their premises are their websites, and all the transactions are made on
the Web. As for distribution, it is still possible to buy newspapers and
magazines at the newsstand or to receive them in the letterbox, but more and
more people read them on the Web, and more and more periodicals are "only"
electronic.
Will the traditional professional groups (booksellers, editors, librarians,
publishers, journalists, etc.) established many years ago stay the same while
being more cyberspace-oriented and become cyberlibrarians, cyberpublishers,
cyberjournalists, cyberbooksellers, etc.? Or will all these professional tasks
be restructured into new professions? With the explosion of the Internet, some
information specialists and others decided to move over to companies specialized
in computing and the Internet.
Even if information specialists or journalists, for example, convince us they
will always be useful, on a general scale the employment trends for the future
are far from exciting. Will all the people working in the print media be able to
get training and retraining in new technologies, or will they be violently hit
by unemployment?
9.4. The Information Society
Jean-Paul, a French musician and writer, wrote in his e-mail of June 21, 1998:
"[...] surfing on the Web operates in rays (I have a centre of interest and I
methodically click on all the links included in home pages) or in hops and jumps
(from one click to another, as they appear). Of course, it is possible with the
print medium. But the difference is striking. So the Internet didn't change my
life, but my writing. You don't write the same way for a site as for a script, a
play, etc."
He also notes that all the Internet functionalities could already be found in
the first Macintosh, which revolutionized the relationship between the user and
the information.
"It is not the Internet which changed the way I write, it is the first Mac that
I discovered through the self-learning of Hypercard. I still remember how
astonished I was during the month when I was learning about buttons, links,
surfing by analogies, objects or images. The idea that a simple click on one
area of the screen allowed me to open a range of piles of cards, and each card
could offer new buttons and each button opened on to a new range, etc. In brief,
the learning of everything on the Web that today seems really banal, for me it
was a revelation (it seems Steve Jobs and his team had the same shock when they
discovered the ancestor of the Mac in the laboratories of Rank Xerox).
Since then I write directly on the screen: I use the print medium only
occasionally, to fix up a text, or to give somebody who is allergic to the
screen a kind of photograph, something instantaneous, something approximate.
It's only an approximation, because print forces us to have a linear
relationship: the text is developing page after page (most of the time), whereas
the technique of links allows another relationship to the time and the space of
the imagination. And, for me, it is above all the opportunity to put into
practice this reading/writing 'cycle', whereas leafing through a book gives only
an idea - which is vague because the book is not conceived for that."
A very important factor too is the radical change between the book culture and
the digital culture. Moving from one to the other as we are doing now deeply
changes our relationship to knowledge, because we move from stable information
to moving information. During the September 1996 meeting of the International
Federation of Information Processing, Dale Spender explained this phenomenon in
a very interesting lecture about Creativity and the Computer Education Industry:
"Throughout print culture, information has been contained in books - and this
has helped to shape our notion of information. For the information in books
stays the same - it endures.
And this has encouraged us to think of information as stable - as a body of
knowledge which can be acquired, taught, passed on, memorised, and tested of
course.
The very nature of print itself has fostered a sense of truth; truth too is
something which stays the same, which endures. And there is no doubt that this
stability, this orderliness, has been a major contributor to the huge successes
of the industrial age and the scientific revolution. [...]
But the digital revolution changes all this. Suddenly it is not the oldest
information - the longest lasting information that is the most reliable and
useful. It is the very latest information that we now put the most faith in -
and which we will pay the most for. [...]
Education will be about participating in the production of the latest
information. This is why education will have to be ongoing throughout life and
work. Every day there will be something new that we will all have to learn. To
keep up. To be in the know. To do our jobs. To be members of the digital
community. And far from teaching a body of knowledge that will last for life,
the new generation of information professionals will be required to search out,
add to, critique, 'play with', and daily update information, and to make
available the constant changes that are occurring."
The Internet will not do away with the print media, the cinema, the radio or the
television. As a new information and communication medium, it is creating its
own space while adapting itself to the other media, and vice versa.
From my point of view, the greatest contribution of the Internet to the print
media is that people no longer run after information, but that the information
is there, available on their screen, and the quantity of this information is
really impressive. While, in the beginning, connecting to the Internet was
rather complicated for the average user, it has now become simple (for example,
with the iMac). One improvement we are all waiting for, however, is a shorter
connection time when accessing any website or individual pages we may wish to
consult, especially those with many pictures. Let us hope that is coming soon.
But, once more, we have to remember that, as revolutionary as it can be,
Internet is still only a means, as stated in Technorealism Overview: "Regardless
of how advanced our computers become, we should never use them as a substitute
for our own basic cognitive skills of awareness, perception, reasoning, and
judgment."
10. INDEX OF WEBSITES
ABU: la bibliothèque universelle (ABU: Association des bibliophiles universels)
AJR/NewsLink (AJR: American Journalism Review)
Amazon.com
American Memory
Athena
Barnesandnoble.com
Bertelsmann
Bielefeld University Library
BitBlioteca
Blackwell's Book Services
British Library
British Library Catalogue
Chaptersglobe.com
Computer Industry Almamach (CIA)
Corbis
Dawson
Dialog
Digital Library Technology (DLT)
D-Lib Program
DOI: The Digital Object Identifier System
EDventure Holdings
E.Journal
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC)
ETEXT Archives (The)
Everybook
E-Zine-List
Gabriel
Gallica
Gutenberg, see: Project Gutenberg
I*m Europe
Images 1
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
International Trade Law (ITL) Monitor
Internet Bookshop (iBS)
Internet Public Library (IPL)
Japanese Text Initiative (The) (JTI)
LEXIS-NEXIS
Liber Liber
Libraries Programme / European Union
Library 2000
Library and Information Science Resources / Library of Congress
Library and Related Resources / University of Exeter
Library Journal Digital (LJDigital)
Library of Congress Catalog
Library of Congress Catalog / Experimental Search System (ESS)
Librius
LibWeb: Library Servers via WWW
Logos
Manuzio Project
Marx/Engels Internet Archive (The)
MediaFinder
Michigan Electronic Library (MEL)
MIT Press (MIT: Massachussets Institute of Technology)
National Academy Press (NAP)
New York Public Library Digital Collections
NewsWorks
Nuvomedia
OCLC Online Computer Library Center
On-Line Books Page (The)
OPAC Network in Europe (ONE)
OPAC 97 / British Library
Pathfinder
Paulus Swaen Old Maps and Prints
Project Gutenberg
Projekt Gutenberg-DE
Projekt Runeberg
Public Libraries of Europe
Public-Access Computer Systems (PACS) Review
Publishers' Catalogues
Publishing Companies Online
Research Libraries Group (RLG)
Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN)
Softbook Press
SPIRO (UC Berkeley Architecture/Slide Library Slide and Photograph Collection)
Stanford Universities Digital Libraries Project
SunSITE of the Berkeley Digital Library
Technorealism
UnCover
Universal Library
UNOG Library (UNOG: United Nations of Geneva)
Waterstone's
Wired
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
11. INDEX OF NAMES
An asterisk (*) indicates the persons who sent contributions especially for this
study. My warmest thanks to all the contributors.
Carlos Alberto de Almeida (Federación Nacional de Periodistas - FENAJ)
Jean-Pierre Angremy (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
Michael Behrens* (Bibliothek der Universität Bielefeld)
Redha Belkhat (El Watan)
Jeffrey P. Bezos (2) (3) (Amazon.com)
Pierre Briançon (Libération)
Merrill Brown (MSNBC)
Dan Carlinsky (American Society of Journalists and Authors)
Jean-Pierre Cloutier* (2) (3) (4) (Chroniques de Cybérie)
Kushal Dave* (computer and modem user)
Christian Debraisne (Nouvelles du bled)
Malti Djallan (Reporters sans frontières)
Robert Downs (writer)
Esther Dyson (EDventure Holdings)
Walter Durling (AT&T Global Information Solutions)
Didier Falkand (writer)
Bruno Giussani (New York Times)
Jean-Paul* (2) (musician and writer)
Annie Kahn (Le Monde)
Wilfred Kiboro (2) (Nation Printers and Publishers Ltd.)
Jeff Killeen (barnesandnoble.com)
Bruce Knecht (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Hart* (2) (3) (Project Gutenberg)
Lesley Hazleton (Success)
Roberto Hernández Montoya* (Venezuela Analítica)
John Labovitz (E-Zine-List)
Brian Lang (2) (British Library)
Peter Leisink (Utrecht University)
Bernie Lunzer (2) (Newspaper Guild)
Shinji Matsumoto (Musicians' Union of Japan - MUJ)
Laurent Mauriac (Libération)
Eric K. Meyer (AJR/NewsLink)
Hermann Meyn (Deutscher Journalisten Verband - DJV)
Michel Muller (Fédération des industries du livre, du papier et de la
communication)
John Mark Ockerbloom* (2) (The On-Line Books Page)
Penny Pagano (free-lance journalist)
Pierre Perroud (Athena)
Peter Raggett* (2) (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development -
OECD)
Etienne Reichel (Visual Communication - VISCOM)
Heinz-Uwe Rübenach (2) (Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger)
Dale Spender (education industry)
Martha L. Stone (ZDNN)
Murray Suid* (writer)
Rodrigo Vergara (Logos)
Philip Wade (writer)
Robert Ware* (OneLook Dictionaries)
Mohammed Zaoui (Nouvelles du bled)