From about the time I was old enough to read until a little after the invention of the IPad, I read newspapers every day.
As a physical object, a newspaper has to be negotiated.
It went across the kitchen table with cereal when I was young or was what I would lie down on to read the Sunday comics. As a teen, reading about a Celtics win took on the air of going to work, since at the time basketball meant business. On the subway, going to actual work, it was folded one way and on the weekend at the diner folded another.
It had terminus and function. You could stay behind it for only so long before mom or dad said it was time to clean the house or rake the leaves. It would get thrown out or used as wrapping or burned up in the fireplace.
As seen through the chaos of no gatekeepers and the internet, the old boy’s club of yesterday’s news media often looks surprisingly good. But what I'm speaking to here is the tactile thing: the ink, the fold, how these did more than deliver information.
Wrapped in plastic on a rainy day, perhaps covered in snow in winter, the paper ended up on the stoop before anyone was awake because someone on a bike threw it there. If there was time before school you gave it a glance and the weekend was the weekend in part because you could linger over the paper.
A newspaper brought texture to life, skin rather than silicon. And texture communicates more than information.
When I was quite young I learned some people did not know apples came from trees. They thought they came from supermarkets.
I was surprised by this and recall it as one of the first times I become aware that people had different understandings of the world than my own.
But how did I know where apples came from? Did we have a tree that produced fruit only birds or squirrels would go near? Had I been to a petting zoo of some kind that gave me this information somehow? I mean, I had never actually picked an apple. Still, I knew that people grew such things, put them in boxes, and then took them to stores. Others, it turned out, lacked this basic feel for the world. Huh.
All of this is too unclear and happened too early in my life for me to clarify how or when the dots connected. But I am sure that the newspaper was somehow part of, or parallel to, my understanding that food must be grown before it is purchased.
Capitalism is not big on texture. It prefers status.
Technology is not big on texture. It prefers the scroll
Too bad, because life loves texture and from it we learn more than we know.