High Tech Fights Old Dignity

by Andrew McGregor

How to maintain integrity on the internet? An entity that was created by mathematicians and commercialized by pornographers is the hopeful nesting ground for the future of science writers.

The writers themselves do not see a problem in continuing what they were doing from their former print days when they chose not to lie and tell the news and things like this.  However, people instinctively do not trust what they read online versus traditional, authoritative sources and the public spends even less time reading online articles than print.

So, the preceding comprise at least two daggers pointed at the proverbial body of science writing.  The task of shoving the thoughtfulness and eloquence of the past into multi-media and diffuse cells does not look to be an easy one.

Fortunately though, there is a hope that all the online technological trend-hopping can just be avoided and that e-paper can fundamentally give people the searchability of the internet without the visual inconvenience of staring at a computer screen.

Acrimony is the only agreement, but there is hope that a future technology will allow the writers to do what they know how to very well and provide their readers with the meaningful content they so very much crave.

Will the twain meet under a new tech sky?

For journalism to survive in the future, it has to embrace the future.  The internet is a disruptive technology. We should be thinking about how this impacts journalism, rather than trying to shoehorn how we currently consume the news into a new technological framework. E-paper seems one of these ideas that takes an existing technology, paper, to create an inferior product.  To survive in the future, we need to let go of the past.
Alfred Hermida

E-paper is not a step backward - it’s an improvement on currently lacking display technology. LCDs are fragile, harsh on the eyes, and extremely power-consumptive; E-paper is flexible, doesn’t glare, and uses a fraction of the electricity that LCDs do. How is this in any way an inferior product?

I meant that e-paper is an inferior product to paper. So we are replacing a technology - paper - that does what it does extremely well, with something that tries to replicate this.

E-paper is a digital display technology. The hope is that it will be able to do everything that a computer monitor can do. And last I checked, paper can’t play video or display web pages. Right now it’s not colorized yet, and the refresh rate is far too slow for video. But it’s been used in cell phones and digital watches already, and E-Ink (http://www.eink.com), a leading developer of E-paper, just got rated the 3rd most innovative company in the electronics and instruments industry by the Patent Board (in the Wall Street Journal).