In his opening keynote speech at the second annual Frankfurt Tools of Change conference, author and media scholar Douglas Rushkoff pulled no punches. "It sounds sad to say it this way... But not as many of us are needed as we used to be," he told the audience. Publishing would be better off if it had only to support "maybe 40% less" of its current workforce as the digital revolution continued to connect writers more directly to their audiences. Writers, Rushkoff said, still needed the likes of editors and printers, but no longer required the "Amazons, Ingrams and Barnes & Nobles" to find their audiences.
Despite his sobering conclusion for publishers, Rushkoff was upbeat in speaking about his latest work, Program or Be Programmed, which he published with upstart alternative publisher OR Books. He warned against merely accepting new technologies without understanding their intended purpose, cautioning against a digital world where many of us used computers but had no idea how to program. That kind of disconnect was leading to a schism in our culture, he suggested. "The people doing the programming are making the world for the rest of us."
Rushkoff's speech followed an eye-opening global perspective from Colombian web designer Pablo Arrieta, who gave conference-goers a sense of how digital technology – and e-books – were changing not just the publishing industry, but people's lives as well; and a speech from TOC conference chair Andrew Savikas, who kicked off the morning with a talk entitled "Stop, Look, and Listen". Just a year ago, at the first Frankfurt TOC, he noted, there were no iPad and no iPad Kindle apps, while this year iPads were common at the show, with many in attendance taking notes on them. He spoke of books not as objects but as things people "hired" to certain jobs, noting that for many needs, digital services, whether e-books or other apps, did those jobs more cheaply and more effectively.
