• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, October 1, 2007

The fact that you are reading this proves the theme of this month's issue of Media magazine: Text-based content is still relevant to savvy media consumers. And it's relevant to them regardless of the media content platform they may be consuming it on.

Some of you are reading these words in our magazine's print edition. Others are reading on MediaPost's Web site. Some of you are reading it via an e-mail newsletter. Others may be reading it via an RSS feed to your personal desktop or handheld device. But you're all reading it.

And other than the tired mug shot of me staring off the page of the print magazine edition, there is nothing fundamentally different about the version of this column that's being read across those platforms. It's all text - some of it rendered via paper and ink, some of it displayed via illuminated pixels.

This may seem like no great epiphany, or a column worth, well, reading. But there is a point here. And it is the theory that in an age of ubiquitous digital media access, where people can access anything, anytime, and anywhere they want, it is platforms that are becoming irrelevant, and the format of content that is growing in importance. That's just a theory, of course.

And the platforms that people consume content on obviously do, and will likely continue to have their own points of relevance. But the malleable nature of digital media is enabling people to platform-shift content - regardless of its format - to the medium of their choice. If content is - as many have long held - the king of the media realm, then it is the format of that content, not the platform on which it is rendered, that determines who its subjects are.

Okay, so that's quite possibly the most overworked metaphor you've read in a long time, but the important thing is that you have just read it. It's important to me, because for the past couple of years I've been wrestling with the fate of text.

There is abundant evidence that we are becoming a less literary society. Putting aside the phenomenal success of Harry Potter, young people don't seem to be reading literature as much as preceding generations. But the truth is that young people are probably reading more than ever before.

The nature of what they are reading may have changed, but the relevance of text-based content has not. They text or IM each other constantly. They post and read volumes on social network pages. And despite the growing popularity of online video, gaming and multimedia content, they still spend a fair amount of their time online reading content.

This may already be evident to you, but it was not to me. I've spent much of the past couple of years pondering the future of the written word. It began when I visited the campus of Ball State University where I was exposed to the work of some leading media designers like Schematic's Dale Herigstad, who presented next-generation multimedia content designs that had little or no text in them.

Herigstad contended that we are becoming a far more visual media society, and that got me thinking. I also discovered that Ball State had the first degree program in the emerging field of "visual journalism," a field that converts much of the traditional text-based information disseminated by newspapers and magazines into visual, multimedia forms. That also got me thinking.

When I returned from my tour at Ball State, I told my boss, Ken Fadner, that it's not print that is dying, but the printed word. "Wrong," he said. "We spend more time reading and writing than we ever did." Think about how much e-mail we read and write, he added. But it wasn't until I read Steven Fredericks' book StrADegy that I understood what was happening with text. Want to know for yourself? I guess you'll have to read it.