Whether you embrace or reject new information technologies, it’s clear that new ways of communicating, generating and absorbing knowledge have an impact on how we learn and think. Much of our world now happens online.

With the accessibility of the web, print publishers increasingly struggle to maintain a reader base and financial solvency. The end of 2014 saw the effective demise of the New Republic, a century-old magazine defined by its in-depth analyses of politics and culture, progressive orientation and support for Israel. Its owner, Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes, forced out senior editors Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier and began morphing TNR into a trendier and more profitable digital media company that promises a “more diverse” outlook (something many interpret as signalling a different stance on Israel). 

It’s hard to not read into the New Republic saga a cautionary tale about new technology and what drives readership and profits on the web. Many periodicals that began as print publications make their digitized content available online – including daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals. The Jewish world has been enriched by this access, as well as by e-zines born as online venues, such as Tablet and Jewcy.

Sometimes this makes print publications superfluous. For example, with our 2014 issue, my co-editor, Gilah Langer, and I decided to wind down Kerem, a journal of creative explorations in Judaism. We founded Kerem in 1992 to publish articles with a modern take on Jewish thought, texts and rituals. Today, the online archive of our magazine (www.kerem.org) joins many other virtual homes for such material, which appears with an immediacy that print cannot match. Want a baby-naming ritual for girls? I can get you 40. Want an egalitarian wedding ceremony? Here are 50. How about interpretations of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, in Genesis? Wait – over 200.

So what does this technology bring us? A richness of resources? An overwhelming but uncurated collection of material? A dumbing down? A smartening up? Yes and yes! In truth, we are still in the throes of this revolution. We cannot yet assess how it will change our ways of learning, thinking and relating to one another. But change them it will, just as did the previous technology revolution – the printing press.

How will this affect our Jewish lives? Well, the printing press did not kill Torah. Instead, industrialized printing enabled the proliferation of Bible, commentaries and other things Jewish. More economical and quicker to produce than hand-written scrolls and folios, printed volumes facilitated study. But they also changed the way people engaged. Literacy displaced memory – or, to put it differently, reading began to replace memorization and recitation.

The sensory experience of learning shifted with the move from recitation to reading. With recitation, space and time are important. We must gather together at the hour and location where recitation takes place, stand or sit as the setting and protocols permit, and hear the same words. The ear, the voice, the breath come into play. We constitute community because we literally come together, and because we partake of the same sensorium.

Reading introduces a tension between individual and community. We choose the space, time and duration. But we can converse with folks in many places about what we’ve read. We become a community of readers, bound not by geography and time, but by our minds.

Even as Jewish learning embraced the opportunities of print technology, Jewish ritual retained earlier learning practices. Rather than fading into artifact, the scroll and its recitation maintained a crucial role in the enactment of Jewish community and spiritually. In retrospect, Judaism accomplished an important feat, embracing both the new and the old.

Still in their infancy, today’s and tomorrow’s new technologies will change how we learn, think and constitute community in ways we can’t yet anticipate. Our challenge will be to embrace what they make possible, but to hold onto what they threaten to eclipse.