Here is a word Warren Ellis told me via Bad Signal: Papernet.
And it intreged me. What is a “papernet”?
” … my interest in this revolves around making printers spit out sheets of paper with interesting things to look at and read on them.”
Before that Warren typed;
” Way, way back when, I suggested a model for the conversation about comics to bypass the then fairly fossilised working channels for such. Create a short magazine in simple black-and-white PDF and make it freeware, so that anyone could print it off. And ask people to print off a bunch and dump them in comics stores. (As opposed to the “glossy” high-end PDF-mag model we have today, which in those days was represented by an attractive, dense PDF mag called BORDERLINE.)
Years later, I condensed the idea down to a broadside model, which Alert Nerd adopted and Ectomo experimented with. But it shares the same thing in common — it’s about spitting paper at the other end. It’s also about creating objects where none existed before.
The broadside, one-sheet model can be broken down a little further. Anyone knows you can fold one sheet into a four-face booklet. You can get even more complicated than that, but, you know, I drink precisely so no-one asks me to do things involving fine motor skills.
Aaron Cope sees a “social letterbox.” I see a box that spits out Things that require only minimal assembly at best. Broadsheets and pamphlets, a one-sheet culture. Emailable. Printable. Minimal.”
More tangental ideas on printed blogs here:
made the astute point of;
To be honest, I see paper as creating an ‘artifact’ rather than just a way of getting info out there, making something disposable for me just means something else to fill up my bin when I’m done with it.
Now – books or comics that read better on paper and might want to be kept would be something else, but how much would a decent repo of that cost?
Followed up by :
The “artifact” part of this experiment’s got to be the point, because otherwise it’s just sentimental resource-wasting. I mean, you want something to read *later in the same day*? That’s exactly the reason *not* to put it on paper. If you want to read it later today just leave the damn browser window open or email it to your iPhone or something.
“Things our friends have written on the internet” actually has a purpose as an artifact. It’s a curated printed souvenir of the year that I’ll look back at in two or three years, and will probably enjoy that it’s yellowed and faded a bit.
And all this got my brain cylinders firing. As intriguing as the concept of a social letter box and micro print on demand is, my initial vision upon hearing the word “papernet” wasn’t just of a box that spurts out paper from a computer. It was something much larger than that, although I can see how the micro POD could play a part in the larger picture. No, what I envisioned was this…
Pieces of paper interconnected creating a vast network of information in what is essentially a low tech paper and ink version of the internet. A steampunk version of the world wide web.
More than just a library (although a library could certainly serve as an information hub) this network exists as the result of each piece of paper linking to another, whether it is through the binding formatting a stack of individual pages into a codex, or footnotes or a bibliography linking to other works, or other forms of recommendations. We see this in comics through letters pages, and editorial comments, and in-story footnotes referencing earlier issues of the serial format itself. We can even see this in music via insert pamphlets archiving lyrics, and photos and other related art and articles.
The key element here in the forming of a papernet, is the linking of one piece of paper containing information, to another.
Not only does this papernet exist in the real world as paper and ink artifacts, if Internet 2 were to become a reality and net neutrality were lost, perhaps it is this papernet that would fill the gap to become the replacement. What was old becomes new again.
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