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Its purpose has just changed.

This blog post from Khoi Vinh got me thinking.

Interesting that Khoi chose to publish the photo in black and white. Maybe he always does this to fit in with the style of his blog, but, for me it emphasises a broader point as well. A medium doesn’t just die: it gets folded into that which comes after it, and its significance changes accordingly. Color photography didn’t kill the black and white image. Slowly, slowly, it just gave it a new meaning: what was once simply “real+actual”, is now “real+historical”, and numerous other meanings. For me, that’s why Khoi’s photograph works in black and white.

Likewise print has not been destroyed by the web, just repurposed. Again, referring back to the photo: people queued in the street to get a physical copy of the paper which declared Barack Obama to be the first African American President of the USA. From disposable news source to collectable item. I wonder how many of the people in that queue are like me: never buying a paper newspaper from one month to the next these days.

So the photo makes me feel happy and inspired because it’s what we are trying to do with our own venture, Scroll. We feel that the ideas and thoughts of our finest web designers, developers and thinkers deserve to be preserved for posterity in the form of a beautiful physical publication, because the look, the feel and the smell of the tangible will have its own unique significance. We were really happy with Scroll Number 1, and it’s been great to see copies of it go out to everywhere from Chennai to Malmo. Can’t wait to get started on Scroll Number 2.