Loading Media

Standing at the business end of a huge HP UV printer waiting for a set of color proofs for a project, the status display of the unit is flashing "Loading Media." A moment later, it announces "Media Jammed." The owner explains the printer has such high tolerance that it notices and alerts on the slightest variations in thickness. No small issue since this baby prints from text paper to 1/4-inch ultra-board.

That's when it hits me again -- it really is about the content, not the media.

You can feed anything into this printer. As the print shop guy said, the proofs of my layout and artwork would be good enough now to be a placemat -- sealed, water resistant thanks to the process.

It's not the media that matters, it's the content we put on it. Whether it's paper or screens, the content is the key.

Why can't we get past using that term -- media -- to refer to the content producers? We dumped "press" like the antiquity we perceived it to have become. The "media" aren't the people that produce what we want to know, to read, to see, to hear. The media is the delivery system.

Right now, it's the delivery system is jammed. Might just be that it's too thick -- imagine that.