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Bits vs paper: a false dilemma
Briefing 05.03.98

"Traditional media published in paper are bound to belong to the history", Negroponte dixit. This misused and poor sentence has burnt up the communication field and triggered an irreconcilable opposition between those in favour of paper and those against it.

The dilemma is false because the proposition is false too. The point is not to know if bit will bury paper or if the latter will subsist to any modification introduced in the information distribution process, it all boils down to what kind of enterprise will come out with digital communication and what sort of enterprise will remain using paper. At this regard, as the history shows, what makes the difference is not vested rights, but instead, capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.

This evolution will make traditional media enterprises face not only the most evident difficulties in their organisation but it will bring about a deep cultural challenge too: being anchored in an organisation designed to work out of the net, when they come into it, they find a very different audience. This one has interests pretty different from those of their usual clients, taking into account information offer as well as faithfulness to the headlines.

This particular offer puts together all the ingredient of multimedia, i.e. a great mobility, easiness to customise and modulate the contents, as well as speed to satisfy the user's demand, made from multiple sources of information. According to this hypothesis, customised electronic newspapers will compete with more general media not only for the adoption of innovative technological solutions but, above all, for a good organisation in order to answer, very quickly, to a rhythm of changes and innovations without comparison in the world of paper. To rise to this level, traditional media will have to face a new range of problems which will include not only the adaptation of the enterprise structures and the work organisation within it, but the way the information professional will do his work. The last will have to compete with a work market with diffuse borderlines --the journalists of the net-- so that they will be compelled to learn new ways of integrating and presenting the information within the framework of emergent electronic districts.

In this new scenario of communication, the popular history of enterprises with a better capacity to adapt to new conditions will be written again. In the coming years, we will see appear some publishing empires dealing with paper/bit, paper/bit/paper, bit/paper, bit/bit, which will be completely new and will cause some of the well-known giant enterprises existing nowadays to go bankruptcy. This won't occur because of the inherent properties of bit against paper but because of the lack of the appropriate adaptation to the terms dictated by the gathering, transformation and broadcast of digital information emergent patterns in a net environment where interactivity works.