The question of whether print is dead should perhaps not be asked as such. It is as self-answerable as the question of whether painting is dead, posed in various, increasingly sophisticated forms since the advent of photographic techniques. Instead of death, we might instead consider the current state of print to be one of migration from form to content, perhaps best theorized in terms borrowed from media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose precocious formulae prove ever-more applicable to the present situation.  McLuhan proposed that “the content of a medium is always another medium”, i.e. speech becomes the content of writing (though of course in public-speaking situations, writing, in turn, often becomes the content of speech).  Further, McLuhan posited, writing becomes the content of printed publication.  And now, of course, print has become the content of web publication.

Despite past predictions, painting is, from even the most cursory glance at the past decade, an undead medium, but certainly one whose content is now fundamentally complicated by the representational techniques of the very media that took it as content, namely photographic and cinematic media, which in turn, have, in various ways become painting’s content.  Painting is not dead, to be sure, but its tasks have also just as surely changed in the hundred-seventy-one years in which we’ve been able to directly fix images to surfaces.  With the development of more efficacious imaging techniques, the use value of painting as a tool of representation became overtaken by its exchange value as art. The present crisis of format in publication appears to have analogues: the efficacy of web publication, with all its approximations, renders print increasingly in the realm of the fetish, with its use value as an information distributor increasingly nullified next to digital forms.  The dilemma is but a fragment of a defining discourse of our age, namely the accelerated shift in most of our mediated forms.  The printed page, like much of our physical world, is meeting an imperative to become the content of digital media.  Despite the persistence of a physical double in many cases, printed publications are, by a certain measure, already one of the most thoroughly digitally integrated forms.  The very use of the form and term, “page,” for individual amounts of web-published information may seem to be an inevitability after a mere decade-and-a-half of thorough digital integration and naturalization, but this structure, one of many possible original solutions to the construction of an Internet, was a choice of format, part of a larger discourse to enlist printed forms as content and maintain digital equivalents of its vocabulary – files, folders, scripts, clipboards, bookmarks—itself part of a larger enlistment of the forms and names of the physical and even metaphysical—desktop, office, library, memory, and so forth.

Rather than ask if print – and more generally, physical forms, are dead or dying, might we not, instead, attempt to assess the relative merits of new and traditional media in an effort of estimating what is gained and lost in the seemingly inevitable process of the digitization of everything? Post-photographic painting cannot escape co-existence and mutual exchange with the new-media forms it spawned, and the future of print will seemingly look similar.

Within the digital-only sphere, it seems that the stratification of media will increase in unknown ways. This topic arises every time the prompt asks if I’d like to “print to a device” or “print to a PDF,” assuming that the transmission of information from a workable state such as Word or InDesign to the fixed format of a PDF is a manner of printing in its guarantee of completeness.   The question becomes: shall I make an internal print or an external print?  How, in the future, will finished or published states be adequately distinguished from working states? By extension, might we conceive of physical printing as the content of the internal printing medium? In the future, how many layers of finish will be distinguishable from each other within the machine itself, and in what new ways will distinctions between the external and internal be replicated within the machine itself?