ByJoe McKendrick,
Senior Contributor.
It wasn’t too long ago – looking back to the 1970s and 1980s – that publications such as Forbes were manually assembled with typewritten content and photos carefully pasted onto storyboards with exacto knives and glue sticks, to be shipped to a printshop for “bluelines” and negatives to be returned and inspected. See a typo or something needing updating, and it’s back to the composition room to paste on the changes.
Of course, such skills are no longer needed – nor desired – for the digital representations of publications you see before you. Technology handles all the onerous backend composition work.
You could say the digitization of publishing has created a “de-skilling” of the process. But how far will things go in an age when artificial intelligence is now usurping cognitive or critical-thinking skills? Are we losing something in the process?
