The Sudden Death of Delay
On the future of publishing
On the northern shore of the island of Bornholm stands Madsebakke, a large granite rock formation. Having climbed it, you’ll find at your feet Denmark’s largest helleristning. These are sketches carved into the rock itself, eternally exposed to the elements. One of the dominant motifs: 14 boats, between 2.500 and 3.000 years old, easily preceding the Roman Empire by at least 400 years. Eternalized, so the experts believe, not just for their significance in the society that built them but for a spiritual promise—as it just so happens that the Sun itself is ferried across the heavens by boat.
It’s easy to forget the target audience for these helleristninger: Us! This is communication by the medium of granite: People of the Bronze Age calling to us across a couple of millennia.
In our age, the means of communication are becoming ubiquitous: Soon, I suspect, we will forget that they are even there. What started as the internet has long since become something else. Soon we will not think of our ‘media’ as anything separable from ‘reality’. They’ll become invisible. In this process, they’re not even competing with the old media, just surpassing them in silence. We celebrate the superiority of this technology without asking, simply: How long will anything we create with it last? Think of Madsebakke. 3000 years of hammering (literally) the same message home: For immortality, choose granite.
Today, everyone with a smartphone is potentially a publishing house. The basic means of entering the public sphere are everywhere and belong to anyone. We think of this as empowerment. That is likely false. Anyone shares in technology, now, but few in power. Whatever this new world is, democratic by default it is not. Precisely this, I believe, will be a haunting dilemma of the years to come: Evidently, the old authorities in the public arena are struggling. Many will be replaced—but perhaps, as the rise of Facebook and Google suggest—not by a new democratic marketplace but by even larger players.
The new technology does NOT create a global world of free and equal agents—only the powerful ILLUSION of exactly that. Likely its largest challenge to us is the APPEARANCE of transparency, of a level playing field stretching in all directions, when REALITY remains very different indeed. On Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and in the new media universe in general, the power structure of the real world really looks if not suspended at least compromised. Here, the Pope and the President are limited to the impact of the same few sentences and the same handful of tricks that everybody else resorts to. These new conditions challenge old hierarchies without favouring new ones—the fact of universal LEVELLING will make itself felt at precisely the moment some new upstart begins to accumulate any power of his own.
Back on Madsebakke, the artists’ graffiti-like sketches reveal to us their world: The boats are chaotically strewn across the surface, mixing with wheel-like sun symbols. This scenery is not well ordered; it is a maelstrom of rivalling boats, pointing in different directions, and for some to be floating, others must seem upended. Whatever they are, they are not a fleet. In this, they resemble the state of the media industry. Competition has turned into a fight for survival, to be decided not in decades but in years. The ocean is no longer a simple horizontal certainty. Maybe the boats will have to do without it.
In this process, the media industry is transforming into the kind of real-time drama it has always sought to create. Our new culture is instantaneous. Our new media culture is live. It never was—it always only claimed to be. I will postulate that this, the SUDDEN DEATH OF THE DELAY, is fundamentally changing not just how we communicate but how we relate to the world around us. Even our perception of life is becoming a joint venture. Even something so seemingly individual is inescapably social. The seafarers’ gathering on Madsebakke was also broadcasting to an audience. What is novel is the speed, of course: Today, we publish one sentence at a time. Soon our thoughts will run at the same rate.
Who will prosper? He who TAKES THE TIME or MAKES THE TIME to prepare. Telling new generations of students (as we do) that they need no knowledge—since it will so soon be outdated—is really the worst possible advice we could offer them. The moment they do need knowledge, they will not have time to find it. But they would have had time to update that which they already knew.
The world is not a level playing field. The basic cosmological principle of the Madsebakke artists was wrong: The Sun really did not travel by boat, and their notion that it did reveals their arrogance. Are we making the same mistake: Thinking that the most powerful players—old and new—will have to travel by the same means, play by the same grassroots rules, as the latest entrant? One could make the very opposite claim: That a telltale sign of genuine power really resides in NOT HAVING TO VIE FOR ATTENTION. The ultimate implication of this is rather bad news for the enlightenment project: The more you publish, the less actual power you possess. Silence then is a surer mark of power.
Could it be true? One thing is certain: The more we communicate, the more we need to communicate to get through. The louder we shout, the less we get heard. The solution? Exactly what the old media began to tell themselves 10 years ago, as the scale of their doom was becoming clearer. To edit. To prioritize. To select. And for everyone who decides to enter this contest for attention, importantly: To prepare. To choose and stay your course. Your boat will not be going in the same direction as the others, but it will sail for 3.000 years.
Helleristning
A helleristning is a northern variant of the palæolithic art form, petroglyphs or rock carvings, that is primarily found in Scandinavia and Northern Russia. The word comes from the old Nordic word hell- meaning a flat, even stone and -ristning meaning ‘scratch’ or ‘carving.’
The most typical motifs of helleristninger are of relatively simple objects or symbols from hunting or agriculture. Hunting motifs usually include animals such as deer, moose, bear, seal, fish, and birds. Only occasionally are human figures depicted. Agricultural motifs feature a wider range of objects such as horse, ox, humans, sun crosses (as here from Madsebakke) and other sun symbols, but also weaponry, chariots, and the ubiquitous boat.
There are many different interpretations of the carvings, but in general it is believed that they bear both social and religious or magical meaning. Their motifs have had great symbolic and ideological significance in the contemporary community.
Kjersgaard (born 1975) was educated at the United World College of Hong Kong and the University of Oxford. He hosts influential political programs on national TV crossing arguments with ministers, culture shapers, and opinion leaders on a daily basis through his work as a television anchor at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (since 2004). He is a book and magazine publisher (since 2002), as well as an editor, moderator, and public speaker (kjersgaard.com).
Photos: Flemming Kaul, Helga Steinreich, Robin Skjoldborg (portrait).