Commentary

Fast Forward: What's Black & White And Soon To Be Dead All Over?

A major analog medium has finally succumbed, but it's probably not one of the ones you're thinking of. No, it's not the death of print, which the digerati have been proclaiming so fervently for so long. Magazines, newspapers, and books surely are being challenged by the migration to digital platforms, but they're still alive and printing.

So what's the first genuine casualty of the digital deathwatch? The blackboard. Yes, the slate-based medium that is virtually synonymous with our public schools is being expelled and is about to bite the, ER, chalk dust.

But don't take my word for it. Pay a visit to the new middle school that is the pride of Hamden, Conn. The school, a humongous, state-of-the-art construction that the school district is touting as a model for the next generation of public education institutions everywhere, doesn't have any blackboards. Not one. In their place are digital "whiteboards."

Okay, so blackboards aren't exactly a major advertising medium, but the shift is worth Madison Ave.'s attention for another important reason: It may be a harbinger for other media to come. Think about it. Blackboards, or at least a primitive form of them, were arguably our first recorded medium: the cave walls our earliest ancestors used to chronicle their lives. Of course, the modern blackboard offered many refinements on their crude prototypes. It enabled "moveable type" before Gutenberg, and even provided a "redo" feature long before Microsoft (we called them erasers, but they served essentially the same function).

The passing of the blackboard is no mere footnote in the history of media evolution. It has sustained its role for millennia, and has earned a soft spot in our popular culture. Movies have celebrated it. Can you hear the sound Captain Quint's nails would make scraping down the side of a digital whiteboard to make his point in Steven Spielberg's "Jaws"? Can you imagine the effect Vic Morrow's character would have if he hurled a digital stylus over Glenn Ford's shoulder in "Blackboard Jungle"? Welcome to the digital jungle, where there are no guns or noses sneezing from dust in the air.

But the death of a medium should be recognized for another important reason: It simply doesn't happen that often. The emergence of new media often impacts old media. They change the way we use the old forms, but they rarely kill them off. TV didn't rub out radio. The VCR and the DVD did not bury movie theaters. DVRs have not led to the mass "telecide" some pundits have predicted. In fact, the only modern mass medium to actually be replaced by newer media was the telegraph, though you can still hear its rudimentary machine language, Morse code, used today (at least among amateur enthusiasts). History shows us that media come and go, but they mostly come - and they rarely go.

As digital whiteboards illustrate, that may be changing. The relatively superior efficiency of digital media may in fact be supplanting the roles of some traditional media. Online search and Internet directories are replacing the need for printed Yellow Pages. Newspaper Web sites may be supplanting the need for printed editions. Television and radio are converting from analog to digital, and along the way are being transformed into nonlinear media that are consumed on-demand, anywhere, anytime, and in any format the user wants. All forms of analog media are going to have to learn to adapt to that, or at least find other reasons for consumers to use them. Otherwise, they will go the way of slate and chalk: They'll be erased.

But before the blackboard officially gives up the ghosts of untold classroom dunces compelled to write their names over and over and over again for dipping Becky's pigtail in the inkwell, I'd like to ask how many readers actually know what an inkwell is. And, if you don't know the answer to that - well, then, how about ink?

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