Books

What I Might Have Written About If I Had More Time

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Some blogs have a regular post each week (sometimes cleverly titled, unlike mine) in which they list a bunch of links that they think readers might enjoy visiting.  Without being regular about it, I have in the past put up similar posts, and now may be good time to revisit the format.  So here are some items that, had I more time, may have generated something more than passing reference, but, as it stands …

  • At the New York Times, Maureen Dowd considers the Catholic Church’s efforts to minister through the Internet in “Forgive Me, Father, For I Have Linked”.  Here’s her clever (depending on your mood) rendition of the Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father, who art in pixels,
linked be Thy name,
Thy Web site come, Thy Net be done,
on Explorer as it is on Firefox.
Give us this day our daily app,
and forgive us our spam,
as we forgive those
who spam against us,
and lead us not into aggregation,
but deliver us from e-vil. Amen.

  • In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has a long review essay of 2010 books that addressed the impact of the Internet on our thinking including, of course, Nick Carr’s The Shallows and Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus. 

Two pieces that will either excite you or depress you depending on your disposition:

And, finally, on publishing revolutions old and new:

Handwriting, Print, and the Self

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

From Tamara Plakins Thornton’s Handwriting in America: A Cultural History:

To reconstruct the colonial world of handwriting, we must also attend to its setting within the world of the printing press.  Here the eighteenth century is especially critical . . . print underwent a qualitative change, now defining a medium that was characteristically abstract, impersonal, and, it was sometimes feared, duplicitous.  The quantitative growth of printing edged out the use of script in many instances, but the qualitative change in print lent new meaning to handwriting, providing script with a symbolic function even as it diminshed its practical utility.  If print entailed self-negation, then by contrast script would entail the explicit presentation of self.  The printed page might be “void of all characters,” but the handwritten one would present the self to its readers . . .

And,

Where print was defined by dissociation from the hand, script took its definition from its relationship to the hand.  Where print was impersonal, script emanated from the person in as intimate a manner as possible.  Where print was opaque, even duplicitous, script was transparent and sincere . . . . handwriting functioned as a medium of the self.

Diminished practical utility = heightened symbolic function

Might this be a useful formula for understanding what can happen when a new technology displaces an old one? Plug in e-readers and books, for example.

On another note, would there have been a “self” needing to present itself to begin with apart from print?  So another principle:  an older technology may be appropriated to address/redress conditions arising from a newer technology.

Reading, With Attitude

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

I can’t improve on Matthew Battles’ introduction:

Maybe in the rush towards the Singularity, towards our apotheosis as networked demiurges who are always plugged in, always on, always checking and modulating moods and statuses and messages, the book will carve out a niche as the technology that lets you disappear. Until they get the whole quantum cloaking thing worked out, after all, the book is the best invisibility tech we have. Reading one increasingly seems like a cultural kilt, a silent version of the skirl of pipes on a misty hillside. The reader is the one true Scotsman of culture.

Please do enjoy:

Julian Smith

via Alan Jacobs

“Sealed in the tombs of their revealed preferences”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

I’ve recently been emailed two interesting posts that intersect nicely with my reading of Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text.  Illich is looking back at a transition in reading technologies and practices in the 12th century in order to gain perspective on the transformation taking  place when he is writing in the early 1990’s.  Illich’s analysis may be even more timely now, 15+ years after he wrote, as e-readers seem to have finally caught on and secured widespread acceptance and use.

The first post, “Bye, Bye, Borders?” by Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, considers recent rumors about the imminent demise of Borders (rumors which most likely are not, as in the case of Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated).  Here is her main point:

Personally I hope they’re wrong, too; like most writers, I like bookshops.  I suspect most of us had our destiny shaped while we were sandwiched behind the bookshelves at our local dealer.

On the other hand, like most of the writers I know, I rarely go into bookshops anymore.  Instead, the UPS truck stops at our house at least once a week, thanks to Prime, and more and more, I order Kindle books straight from my iPad.  I know that I am missing something–the serendipity of browsing through the bookshelves–which I have never replaced at Amazon; much as I love the convenience of online shopping, I never find anything that I am not looking for.

This is when the communitarians start looking for a government rule that will make it harder for people to buy books online; the environmentalists complain about all the energy wasted on shipping; and the moderate nostalgists start urging people to support their local bookstore.  But I’ll go by a combination of revealed preference and introspection:  the world may be better off without Borders, even though I (and everyone else who has stopped shopping there) likes the idea of its existence.

There is a certain irony here since it was not that long ago that Borders and Barnes & Noble were the villains, not the victims, in the story we told about the demise of small, independent books shops.  You remember You’ve Got Mail, no?

The second post, “Open Books:  The E-Reader Reads You” by Rob Horning at The New Inquiry, considers the wealth of data about the user that becomes available to publishers and distributors through E-Readers like Amazon’s Kindle.  Horning makes a number of observations that pair up suggestively with themes in Illich.  Consider this paragraph, for example, in which Horning cites literary critic Franco Moretti:

That is, the truth about them for publishers will be no different from what it is for distant-reading critics like Moretti — a matter of tabulated, graphable data. “Distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text,” Moretti argues. “And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more.”

Moretti’s advocacy of distance appears a ways down a road tread by Hugh of Saint Victor’s when he advocated a pilgrim ethic for scholars summarized as follows by Illich:

With the spirit of self-definition, estrangement acquires a new positive meaning.  Hugh’s call away from the ‘sweetness of one’s native soil’ and to a journey of self-discovery is but one instance of the new ethos . . Hugh’s insistence on the need that the scholar be an exile-in-spirit echoes this mood.

Like McArdle, Horning explores the loss of the physical bookstore (or library) as a place of serendipitous discovery in light of increasingly sophisticated recommendation algorithms used by online booksellers.

Thanks to these innovations, publishers will know what books you’ve read; when you read them; what you chose to read next, or simultaneously; how long it took you; and what other books people read when they read what you have. The potential data mine this all represents may eventually divest readers of their need to discover anything. Instead, recommendation engines can take over, manufacturing serendipity for users as is already the case on Amazon’s website, only now with the not necessarily solicited advice being ported directly into the scene of reading. And if you shop through Google’s new bookstore, all that information and be joined with all the data derived from your search and browsing histories to further refine recommendations and circumscribe the scope of what is readily offered to you.

Horning, however, is slightly less sanguine than McArdle:

But perhaps more important, publishers will be able to draw from trends in this rich data for its editorial decision making, exploiting connections this information reveals among various demographics in the reading public, calibrating their lists to actual reader behavior with more precision that dumb sales data once allowed. Such rapid responsiveness can trigger a feedback loop that precludes the possibility of spontaneous, unexpected desires, fashioning a smoothly functioning market sealed off from vital disruptions. Readers will be sealed in the tombs of their revealed preferences. To capture the feeling of discovery and possibility again, they will have to look somewhere other than books.

The most startling contrast is clearly between McArdle’s somewhat begrudging embrace of “revealed preference” and Horning’s characterization of the same as “tombs” into which readers will be sealed.  Horning’s concerns also echo those of Jaron Lanier which we noted here a couple of months ago:

Students spend a lot of time acting as trivialized relays in giant schemes designed for the purposes of advertising and other revenue-minded manipulations. They are prompted to create databases about themselves and then trust algorithms to assemble streams of songs and movies and stories for their consumption . . . . The problem is that students could come to conceive of themselves as relays in a transpersonal digital structure.

The title of Horning’s post is interesting in this regard:  “Open Books:  The E-Reader Reads You.”  There was also a sense in which the book read the reader in twelfth century.   The book presented the reader with an external standard to which the reader, depending on the text,  may need to conform.  This is why Hugh believed reading and learning required humility.  Without humility the reader would fail to subject his own views and practices to the order of things that a text may reveal.  In other words, the book read the reader by illuminating where the reader must change; the reader read to discover an order to which they must align their inner world.  The technology bundled with the E-reader, and the economic models it participates in, reads the user and precisely the opposite sense.  It reads the reader in order to bring external realities into conformity with the existing internal dispositions of the user.

What reading is and is for, what counts for knowledge and wisdom, the rise and fall of social hierarchies — these have been transformed over the course of time as new technologies for representing and communicating human thought have emerged .  With Illich, I’m hopeful that understanding past developments in these areas will give us some guideposts to steer by as we experience these types of transformations in the present.

_______________________________

Thanks to Mr. Ridenhour and Mr. Greenwald for the links.

Multitasking Monks?

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

In her essay, “Medieval Multitasking:  Did We Ever Focus?”, Elizabeth Drescher addresses the Nicolas Carr/Clay Shirky debate on the relative merits of the Internet.  Drescher’s piece distinguishes itself by taking, as her title suggests, a long view of the issue and by its breezy, phenomenological style.  I think she is right to look for historical antecedents that shed light on our use of new media, however, I have reservations about where she ends up.  I tend to see more discontinuity than she does, particularly in the kind of relationship with the text encouraged by certain features of new media. You can read some of my thoughts in the Letters section below Drescher’s essay or here.  Quick excerpt:

Modularity, or what Manovich also calls the “fractal structure of new media,” allows for individual elements of a hypertext (text, image, video, chart, audio, etc.) to retain their integrity and be easily abstracted and recombined in another setting. Now to get a sense of the significance of this development, imagine a medieval monk attempting to easily abstract the graphic elements of an illuminated manuscript for use in another setting.

I single out modularity because it gets at an important distinction the gets lost if we lay all the emphasis on continuity. Modularity has contributed to a massive reconfiguration of the relationship between the media artifact and the user. The conditions of new media have allowed us to approach texts (and I use that term in the widest possible sense) on the Internet as potential creators, as well, users . . .

We now seem less apt at receiving a text and, at least to begin with, submitting ourselves to it. This is a particularly important development in religious contexts. We are now more likely to jump into the creation of our own meaning and our own texts without first allowing the texts to read us as it were. We are less likely to listen to the text before wanting to speak back to it or speak it anew. We are first disposed to shape the text rather than being open to how the text may shape us.

Along the way Drescher links to the op-ed piece by Steven Pinker that we noted here earlier, but she also links to an op-ed by David Brooks, “The Medium is the Medium”, which I had missed.  In his piece Brooks makes some interesting distinctions and observations, yet my initial response is mixed.  Perhaps more on that later.