Is web publishing an unconscious act? A stupid question, but still: In the cartoons controversy, online publishing somehow didn’t seem to “matter”. The Norwegian foreign minister kept repeating over and over that no leading Norwegian news organization had published the cartoons, only a small weekly newspaper. But Dagbladet’s online edition had. Dagbladet is Norway’s second largest newspaper measured in number of readers, and the website will soon have just as many readers as the printed paper (669.000 online readers by the last count). Hence, web publishing is, if not unconscious, still seen as a less important act than printing. If it weren’t like that, why should people care about yet another paper reprinting the cartoons when a simple web search will produce an abundance of cartoon copies? (here a couple of blog collections).

This must be a transitional phenomenon. The web ensures that the cartoons will be instantly available – forever. That’s a very long tail. Without digital media, it’s hard to see that the issue would have become a global one at all (then again, the web and 21st century globalization are inseparable). The endurance of the web makes it much harder to make an issue go away completely – stay in obscurity, yes, disappear, no. Of course there are plenty of conscious acts that must be performed to make something into a big story with real implications – in the cartoons case such acts as the Danish imams touring the Middle East to lobby for action against Jyllands-Posten and Danish authorities.

Not all foreign ministers see web publishing the same way. In Sweden a website that published the cartoons was closed by the ISP after the foreign ministry and the security police contacted the company. And the Wikipedia entry is currently “temporarily disabled” from editing by new or anonymous users after vandals had tried to alter it. No unconscious acts there.