Books are civilization. (Jonathan Safran Foer)
On the Charlie Rose television program on November 2, 2012, two writers and two publishers came together to discuss the future of books. Jane Friedman, formerly with HarperCollins but now CEO of Open Road Integrated Media, claimed to care for all forms of books—ebooks as well as print. Tim O’Reilly, a leading publisher of books and manuals on digital technology, could envision the day when print would be reserved only for fine editions, essentially collector’s items. The two authors insisted, however, that printed books have qualities that electronic media, even ebooks, cannot duplicate. For Ken Auleta, a writer for the New Yorker, printed books allow you “to have a conversation with yourself.” The novelist Jonathan Safran Foer agreed. It is not only the publishing industry itself that is endangered, Foer said, but something more: "...books are civilization. I'm much more worried about civilization's survival than about an industry’s survival.” For authors like Foer, our contemporary media culture looks like the end of civilization because it demotes or decenters modes ways of reading and writing associated with print.
At this moment it seems quite unlikely that the printed book will disappear. And yet something important is coming to an end. For hundreds of years, print literacy has been associated with a definition of culture in which certain ideas deserved to be set in type and other did not. From Condorcet in the eighteenth century to Habermas in the twentieth, the claim has been that the printing press facilitated debate, political participation, and liberal values. In the age of print, our culture had a center and a periphery. In today’s media culture, however, when many reading communities are coming to prefer digital forms, there is no longer universal agreement on the role that the printed book should play. In The Late Age of Print (2009), Ted Striphas also argues that although the printed book is no danger of disappearing, “...[t]he culture of books has been shifting—and continues to shift—under our collective feet.” (2) Of all the constituencies affected by the diminished status of the printed book, the one that sees itself most threatened is the literary community. Although this seems obvious, the literary community could have reacted otherwise and embraced digital forms of writing, as the scientific community has done. Writers and critics were offered the opportunity in the 1990s to reimagine literature outside of the paradigm of the printed book, a literature not based on the monumental quality of the printed page.
In the vague term “literary community” I mean to include the usual suspects: the publishing houses, authors of “serious” fiction and nonfiction, especially in the various literary capitals, those who work at or publish in literary magazines, and the readers of all these publications. Whether this extended community is larger or smaller (measured in absolute numbers or by percentage of the population) than it was fifty years ago can be argued. The important point is not its size, but its position within our media culture. Today’s literary community must contend not only with a threat to the book itself but also with the breakdown of the distinction between serious literature and popular forms. The two themes that we are exploring—the demotion of elite culture and the rise of digital media—intersect here with particular force. The community finds it difficult to separate these two issues, cares passionately about both, and so remains committed to print. Our larger media culture, however, is increasingly agnostic about the forms in which it reads and writes. The future of the printed book, the question that seems a matter of life or death to the literary community, is of relatively little concern to most today, even to many who continue to read fiction or non-fiction for pleasure as well as for their work—not to mention the many millions who prefer digital forms like videogames or the online remediations of television and film.
At this moment it seems quite unlikely that the printed book will disappear. And yet something important is coming to an end. For hundreds of years, print literacy has been associated with a definition of culture in which certain ideas deserved to be set in type and other did not. From Condorcet in the eighteenth century to Habermas in the twentieth, the claim has been that the printing press facilitated debate, political participation, and liberal values. In the age of print, our culture had a center and a periphery. In today’s media culture, however, when many reading communities are coming to prefer digital forms, there is no longer universal agreement on the role that the printed book should play. In The Late Age of Print (2009), Ted Striphas also argues that although the printed book is no danger of disappearing, “...[t]he culture of books has been shifting—and continues to shift—under our collective feet.” (2) Of all the constituencies affected by the diminished status of the printed book, the one that sees itself most threatened is the literary community. Although this seems obvious, the literary community could have reacted otherwise and embraced digital forms of writing, as the scientific community has done. Writers and critics were offered the opportunity in the 1990s to reimagine literature outside of the paradigm of the printed book, a literature not based on the monumental quality of the printed page.
In the vague term “literary community” I mean to include the usual suspects: the publishing houses, authors of “serious” fiction and nonfiction, especially in the various literary capitals, those who work at or publish in literary magazines, and the readers of all these publications. Whether this extended community is larger or smaller (measured in absolute numbers or by percentage of the population) than it was fifty years ago can be argued. The important point is not its size, but its position within our media culture. Today’s literary community must contend not only with a threat to the book itself but also with the breakdown of the distinction between serious literature and popular forms. The two themes that we are exploring—the demotion of elite culture and the rise of digital media—intersect here with particular force. The community finds it difficult to separate these two issues, cares passionately about both, and so remains committed to print. Our larger media culture, however, is increasingly agnostic about the forms in which it reads and writes. The future of the printed book, the question that seems a matter of life or death to the literary community, is of relatively little concern to most today, even to many who continue to read fiction or non-fiction for pleasure as well as for their work—not to mention the many millions who prefer digital forms like videogames or the online remediations of television and film.
Civilization at Risk
In its 2004 report “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” the National Endowment for the Arts was already warning of a decline in the reading of literature. The director, poet Dana Goia, wrote in the Preface that: "Reading at Risk...documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted—our society’s massive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information." The medium of print is vital to culture:
While oral culture has a rich immediacy that is not to be dismissed, and electronic media offer the considerable advantages of diversity and access, print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible. To lose such intellectual capability – and the many sorts of human continuity it allows – would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment
and indeed to democracy:
As this report unambiguously demonstrates, readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life. The long-term implications of this study not only affect literature but all the arts – as well as social activities such as volunteerism, philanthropy, and even political engagement.
Such warnings return throughout the report. Literature makes cultural life possible, and the printed book is its indispensable medium. In 2009, the NEA issued another report, “Reading on the Rise,” in which it happily reported a reversal of the trend. More adults were reading than at any time since 1982. Interestingly 15% of the respondents now reported that they had read some literature “online.” Between 2004 and 2009, Amazon’s Kindle had been launched. Still, the printed book was deemed essential, and the rise in literary reading showed that “cultural decline is not inevitable” (4).
The Charlie Rose discussion and the NEA reports are three expressions of the assumption that the particular form of the book that has been dominant since the late sixteenth century is irreplaceable. The assumption remains powerful today because of our educational system and because of the residual prestige of the literary establishment, both of which are remnants of the cultural hierarchy of the twentieth century.
The Charlie Rose discussion and the NEA reports are three expressions of the assumption that the particular form of the book that has been dominant since the late sixteenth century is irreplaceable. The assumption remains powerful today because of our educational system and because of the residual prestige of the literary establishment, both of which are remnants of the cultural hierarchy of the twentieth century.
The book as a medium
For the intellectual elites of the twentieth century, the printed book embodied the order and unity of culture; it was the guarantor of knowledge. The belief in the centrality of books was held by professional writers, literary scholars, philosophers, historians, and even by art historians and musicologists, who studied other media but set down their results in books and articles. Although most academics dismissed McLuhan’s claim that television or other forms of electronic media were assuming a defining role in culture in the 1960s, they were likely to agree implicitly with McLuhan that the period from Gutenberg to the twentieth century was indeed an age of the print. Now, in the twenty-first century, the book is simultaneously changing form and losing status, and writers and humanists find these changes traumatic.
What is perhaps surprising is how untraumatic these changes are to others in contemporary media culture. People read printed books when that seems appropriate; at other times they get their texts online or in ebooks. They replace books with other media forms for their entertainment and information. This is as true of "knowledge workers" and researchers in the sciences and some social sciences as it is of those who read simply for pleasure. In the mid-twentieth century, research in the physical sciences was always published in journal articles or in some cases conference proceedings. Today that research is increasingly published or pre-published on the Internet. The printed book has rapidly and quietly ceased to be the predominant symbolic form of our media culture. Striphas (2009) shows that “everydayness” of books, their role as commodities in consumer culture, dates back many decades. He argues convincingly that the changing roles of printed books today need to be seen in the light of the shifting economics of production and exchange throughout the twentieth century. Still, the ubiquity of books throughout this period did not hinder cultural elites from elevating their role as a cultural symbol.
Print is not, however, being replaced in that role by any newer medium. In the 1950s and 1960s, the new media wave that swept over the United States (and less forcefully over Europe) was television, and television was seen as a threat to the arts and all aspects of literate society. In May, 1961, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton B. Minnow, addressed the National Association of Broadcasters and told them famously that their programming had made American television "a vast wasteland." His view was shared for decades by American intellectuals. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Neil Postman wrote what he called a "lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendency of the Age of Television." (8) It was a lamentation because…
What is perhaps surprising is how untraumatic these changes are to others in contemporary media culture. People read printed books when that seems appropriate; at other times they get their texts online or in ebooks. They replace books with other media forms for their entertainment and information. This is as true of "knowledge workers" and researchers in the sciences and some social sciences as it is of those who read simply for pleasure. In the mid-twentieth century, research in the physical sciences was always published in journal articles or in some cases conference proceedings. Today that research is increasingly published or pre-published on the Internet. The printed book has rapidly and quietly ceased to be the predominant symbolic form of our media culture. Striphas (2009) shows that “everydayness” of books, their role as commodities in consumer culture, dates back many decades. He argues convincingly that the changing roles of printed books today need to be seen in the light of the shifting economics of production and exchange throughout the twentieth century. Still, the ubiquity of books throughout this period did not hinder cultural elites from elevating their role as a cultural symbol.
Print is not, however, being replaced in that role by any newer medium. In the 1950s and 1960s, the new media wave that swept over the United States (and less forcefully over Europe) was television, and television was seen as a threat to the arts and all aspects of literate society. In May, 1961, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton B. Minnow, addressed the National Association of Broadcasters and told them famously that their programming had made American television "a vast wasteland." His view was shared for decades by American intellectuals. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Neil Postman wrote what he called a "lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendency of the Age of Television." (8) It was a lamentation because…
m]ost of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth, and information. I will try to demonstrate that as typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television takes its place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines. (Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985, 29)
Postman expressed rather dramatically what most humanists as well as professional writers and critics felt and still feel. These former elites cannot imagine the current condition in which the book is simple one medium among several, important for some cultural communities and not others. Throughout much of the twentieth century, our media culture accepted the modernist assumption that each medium (film, television, radio, print) was unitary and separate and made a distinct contribution to our culture. Today these media now longer seem so independent, especially given the ways in which digital media facilitate cross media forms. But the literary community remains committed to the purity of its medium, long after the visual arts abandoned modernist purity.
The challenge of the digital
Neil Postman was wrong to believe that television was displacing print from the cultural center; instead, the center itself was simply dissolving. In the United States three television networks did enjoy a few decades of dominance in popular entertainment. After fighting off a challenge from television in the 1950s, however, film remained important to popular culture, as entertainment companies figured out how to leverage their relationship to television to advertise their films and add to their cachet. Film became the elite form of television in the pseudo-hierarchy of popular culture in the second half of the twentieth century. One sign of this hierarchy was that film actors seldom deigned to appear on television, while television actors longed to make the jump to film. (In our current and surprising “golden age” of television drama, this is no longer always true.) Both film and television did perhaps eat into audiences for popular forms of reading, but even here millions continued to read mysteries, science fiction, romance novels, spy novels and other forms in addition to or instead of going to the movies and watching tv shows. The 2009 NEA report indicated that half of its surveyed readers of literary texts read “mysteries”; about 30% science fiction; nearly 25% romances—and each of these categories represents tens of millions of readers (11).
When it came to education, however, Postman and many others were worrying if not unnecessarily, at least prematurely. Television was never able to challenge the educational role of printed books and in particular textbooks in North America and Europe. All the new media of the nineteenth and twentieth century (photography, film, radio, and television) were primarily perceptual rather than symbolic media, and educational institutions remained convinced that symbolic representation in language and mathematics was more important than perceptual presentation through images and sounds. All students were expected to acquire verbal and mathematical skills, while photography, film-making, and drawing were considered special skills, relegated to elective course or after-school clubs. Art and music programs were (and still are) always in danger of elimination when school budgets were squeezed.
The computer has posed a greater challenge to the printed book than film, television, radio, or photography had ever done, as was gradually recognized from the 1980s to the 2000s. The Artificial Intelligence movement had already succeeded in defining the computer as a symbol manipulator, and the first convincing uses of desktop computer, their killer apps, were symbol manipulators: word processing and spreadsheets. Even though Alan Kay and Steve Jobs were already showing that the computer could be a medium for graphics and sound —in other words that the computer could be as “frivolous” as film and television—it would take years before personal computers would function effectively as media centers. Reading, writing, and arithmetic—tasks that everyone associated with education—remained the primary applications of personal computers well into the 1990s. When the Internet and World Wide Web were developed and expanded to include large numbers of consumers in the 1990s, they seemed to offer them an unlimited fund of textual as well as visual information. In 1996, when the Clinton administration proposed the goal of putting a computer in every classroom in America, there were certainly skeptics among educational professionals, but the opposition was muted. It was general accepted that computers belonged in education, which had not been true of any of the previous media technologies of the twentieth century.
The computer was becoming a complement to the textbook in education, but it could not replace the printed book, because it was less comfortable and usually less convenient to read text on the grainy screen of a laptop or desktop computer than on the printed page in general. Reading on the screen came to be preferred only for specialized activities, such as access to commercial, bibliographic, and scientific databases. There seemed to be an obvious division of labor: computers were for editing and revising one’s own writing, searching and scanning longer texts, and consulting databases; printed books and offprints were for any form of extended reading for pleasure or education. Textbooks grew fatter and heavier (and more lucrative for publishers), although they now sometimes included a CD-ROM containing interactive exercises or video to be played on the computer.
In his Introduction to a symposium on The Future of the Book (1996), Geoffrey Nunberg wrote that technical manuals, directories, and catalogs would all be digitized, but...
When it came to education, however, Postman and many others were worrying if not unnecessarily, at least prematurely. Television was never able to challenge the educational role of printed books and in particular textbooks in North America and Europe. All the new media of the nineteenth and twentieth century (photography, film, radio, and television) were primarily perceptual rather than symbolic media, and educational institutions remained convinced that symbolic representation in language and mathematics was more important than perceptual presentation through images and sounds. All students were expected to acquire verbal and mathematical skills, while photography, film-making, and drawing were considered special skills, relegated to elective course or after-school clubs. Art and music programs were (and still are) always in danger of elimination when school budgets were squeezed.
The computer has posed a greater challenge to the printed book than film, television, radio, or photography had ever done, as was gradually recognized from the 1980s to the 2000s. The Artificial Intelligence movement had already succeeded in defining the computer as a symbol manipulator, and the first convincing uses of desktop computer, their killer apps, were symbol manipulators: word processing and spreadsheets. Even though Alan Kay and Steve Jobs were already showing that the computer could be a medium for graphics and sound —in other words that the computer could be as “frivolous” as film and television—it would take years before personal computers would function effectively as media centers. Reading, writing, and arithmetic—tasks that everyone associated with education—remained the primary applications of personal computers well into the 1990s. When the Internet and World Wide Web were developed and expanded to include large numbers of consumers in the 1990s, they seemed to offer them an unlimited fund of textual as well as visual information. In 1996, when the Clinton administration proposed the goal of putting a computer in every classroom in America, there were certainly skeptics among educational professionals, but the opposition was muted. It was general accepted that computers belonged in education, which had not been true of any of the previous media technologies of the twentieth century.
The computer was becoming a complement to the textbook in education, but it could not replace the printed book, because it was less comfortable and usually less convenient to read text on the grainy screen of a laptop or desktop computer than on the printed page in general. Reading on the screen came to be preferred only for specialized activities, such as access to commercial, bibliographic, and scientific databases. There seemed to be an obvious division of labor: computers were for editing and revising one’s own writing, searching and scanning longer texts, and consulting databases; printed books and offprints were for any form of extended reading for pleasure or education. Textbooks grew fatter and heavier (and more lucrative for publishers), although they now sometimes included a CD-ROM containing interactive exercises or video to be played on the computer.
In his Introduction to a symposium on The Future of the Book (1996), Geoffrey Nunberg wrote that technical manuals, directories, and catalogs would all be digitized, but...
…[a]mong the books that people tend to care about as books, by contrast, the process of conversion is likely to be slower and much more selective....As for poety reviews, novels, self-help books, political memoirs, critical editions, art books, travel guides...well, it is simply too early to say. Some will probably continue to rest chiefly on printed supports, some will divide their lives between print and digital media, some will emigrate definitively, taking their place along a variety of utterly new digital genres. (12-13)
Nunberg was more pragmatic than most academics in the 1990s, and his predictions, made a decade before the Kindle, have proven not to be far off. Still, like the overwhelming majority of the literary community, Nunberg assumed that aesthetic and scholarly writing would remain tied to the medium of print.
From hypertext to ebooks
In the early decades, then, the advantages of using the computer seemed to lie in writing rather than reading. Writing became a composite technique involving various ratios of handwriting and keyboarding, but the final project was still ink on paper. The goal of word processing was to produce a perfect final copy to print out. A small group of technologists and writers in the United States, however, imagined that the computer could redefine the whole economy of reading and writing through a new form called hypertext. The term had been coined in the 1960s by Ted Nelson, although the idea of technologically mediated linking first appeared explicitly much earlier, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly by Vannevar Bush (1945), a United States government science advisor during the Second World War. In the 1980s, standalone hypertext systems began to appear; the most important commercial system was Apple’s Hypercard. In 1989, however, Tim Berners-Lee demonstrated that the real power of hypertext lay in its potential to link text and data across networked computers. A physicist working at CERN, Berners-Lee first conceived of the World Wide Web as a electronic system for storing and sharing scientific documents (Interview, Academy of Achievement, 2007). The World Wide Web was originally meant to be a new form for the reading and writing of scientific texts and data; it was only later in the 1990s that images and eventually video and audio redefined the Web as the “medium of mediums.” As we know, global hypertext did take over certain tasks that had belonged to print: databases, catalogs, encyclopedias. Yet, as Nunberg foresaw, the Web itself never supplanted the printed book for the reading of biographies, histories, or novels.
Nor did hypertext and the Web revolutionize the nature of writing. Early enthusiasts believed that hypertext could would give us new kinds of fiction and nonfiction. They invoked an argument that McLuhan would have approved of: that as a technological extension of human thought, hypertext supported a form of associative thinking that had been devalued in the age of print, which had favored linear thinking (Landow 1992). Although many of the early enthusiasts were disappointed with the Berners-Lee’s version of hypertext, which seemed to them still too hierarchical and authoritarian, the World Wide Web proceeded to recruit millions and eventually hundreds of millions of new users to online reading.
In 1992, a well-known author of American fiction, Robert Coover, published a piece in the New York Times Book Review speculating that hypertext might be “The End of Books”. “Hypertext is truly a new and unique environment,” he wrote...
Nor did hypertext and the Web revolutionize the nature of writing. Early enthusiasts believed that hypertext could would give us new kinds of fiction and nonfiction. They invoked an argument that McLuhan would have approved of: that as a technological extension of human thought, hypertext supported a form of associative thinking that had been devalued in the age of print, which had favored linear thinking (Landow 1992). Although many of the early enthusiasts were disappointed with the Berners-Lee’s version of hypertext, which seemed to them still too hierarchical and authoritarian, the World Wide Web proceeded to recruit millions and eventually hundreds of millions of new users to online reading.
In 1992, a well-known author of American fiction, Robert Coover, published a piece in the New York Times Book Review speculating that hypertext might be “The End of Books”. “Hypertext is truly a new and unique environment,” he wrote...
Artists who work there must be read there. And they will probably be judged there as well: criticism, like fiction, is moving off the page and on line, and it is itself susceptible to continuous changes of mind and text. Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple....” NYT (June 21, 1992)
Coover’s claims were largely ignored. Throughout the 1990s, a small community of writers produced hypertext fictions, usually outside the Web, and some teachers of writing in American universities induced their students to produce hypertext essays. Even today, a small group is pursuing more dynamic forms of electronic poetry or digital literature. The larger literary community, however, has disregarded this avant-garde. The writers of “serious” fiction and essays as well as most academics do not consider that literature could change in any fundamental way through its engagement with digital technology. A search of the New York Review of Books, for example, (which is itself available as an online database) reveals that the word “hypertext” occurs six over the entire range of issues between 1996 and 2013. Three citations use the term descriptively to refer to the Web; the other three dismiss in passing the notion of hypertext narrative or fiction.
In fact, most of the those who argued in the 1990s that the book would become digital were not thinking about a new form of hypertext literature. They imagined that traditional printed texts would simply be transferred to electronic form and that readers would receive them online and read them on their desktops or laptop screens. [@does Negroponte predict this? Nelson] And the literary community was not prepared to accept even this degree of change. The novelist Annie Proulx wrote in a 1994 article entitled “Books on Top”:
In fact, most of the those who argued in the 1990s that the book would become digital were not thinking about a new form of hypertext literature. They imagined that traditional printed texts would simply be transferred to electronic form and that readers would receive them online and read them on their desktops or laptop screens. [@does Negroponte predict this? Nelson] And the literary community was not prepared to accept even this degree of change. The novelist Annie Proulx wrote in a 1994 article entitled “Books on Top”:
.the electronic highway is for bulletin boards on esoteric subjects, reference works, lists and news -- timely, utilitarian information, efficiently pulled through the wires. Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever. / In a curious way the computer emphasizes the unique virtues of the book: The book is small, lightweight and durable, and can be stuffed in a coat pocket, read in the waiting room, on the plane. What are planes but flying reading rooms?
If you walk from the back to the front of an airplane today, you are likely to see passengers in every row with digital devices: some reading books on iPads or Kindles; many playing videogames or listening to digital music. Others may be reading printed newspapers or paperbacks. For our media culture, the format has become a matter of preference and availability.
The contest over a remediation like this one always comes down to competing claims of authenticity. Proponents claim that the new form or medium can do something that the old could not; opponents claim that something essential in the old form is lost. In this case the opponents emphasize the material qualities of the printed book. Proulx wrote that the book’s unique virtues (small, lightweight, durable) give it a practical advantage, which was of course true in 1994. Beyond the practical, however, the materiality of the book defines us as readers, which is to say our literate identity: “Books give esthetic and tactile pleasure, from the dust jacket art to the binding, paper, typography and text design, from the moment of purchase until the last page is turned. Books speak even when they stand unopened on the shelf. If you would know a man or woman, look at their books, not their software.”For Proulx as for Foer thirteen years later, the printed book does vital cultural work, and Proulx and Foer are two of many who now praise the feel of the page, the weight of the book in the hand, in contrast to our experience of the computer screen or the ebook. Foer’s commitment to the materiality of the printed book is genuine. His Tree of Codes, for example, experiments with different forms of typography and ways of reading. “On the brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of a book that can’t forget it has a body,” Foer said of the design (Heller 2010).
This romantic embrace of the materiality of print is striking because the literary community in the twentieth century had tended to downplay the look and feel of the book. The printed book was merely the instrument that conveyed the text to the reader. Paperbacks with mediocre typefaces, acidic paper, and cheap bindings characterized twentieth-century printing. Literary criticism itself isolated the idealized text from its material expression. During the 1950s and 1960s, the study of literature in the United States was dominated by the New Criticism, whose goal was to appreciate literary texts in their own right, as a structure of symbols independent of the conditions of production or the biography of the author. The critical approaches that followed—such as structuralism, semiotics, and poststructuralism— went even further in abstracting the text from its physical origins. These critical perspectives may have agreed about little else, but they all understood literature as a space of texts, not of paper and bindings.
Throughout this period, bibliography, the study of books as physical and cultural objects, was a highly specialized and limited academic discipline (Darnton 2009). Twentieth-century disinterest in the materiality of the book is in fact the continuation of a longer tradition. The very idea of copyright, which originated in the eighteenth century, emphasized the immateriality of the text. What was protected was the verbal expression of ideas, the words themselves. For the purposes of copyright, a book is the same book no matter what font its words appear in, no matter whether the pages are made of woodpulp or velum, and now by extension whether the words appear in an electronic reader or are stored on a disk drive. These are all emanations of some Platonic form of that book, and they are all protected, in theory if not practice.
The contest over a remediation like this one always comes down to competing claims of authenticity. Proponents claim that the new form or medium can do something that the old could not; opponents claim that something essential in the old form is lost. In this case the opponents emphasize the material qualities of the printed book. Proulx wrote that the book’s unique virtues (small, lightweight, durable) give it a practical advantage, which was of course true in 1994. Beyond the practical, however, the materiality of the book defines us as readers, which is to say our literate identity: “Books give esthetic and tactile pleasure, from the dust jacket art to the binding, paper, typography and text design, from the moment of purchase until the last page is turned. Books speak even when they stand unopened on the shelf. If you would know a man or woman, look at their books, not their software.”For Proulx as for Foer thirteen years later, the printed book does vital cultural work, and Proulx and Foer are two of many who now praise the feel of the page, the weight of the book in the hand, in contrast to our experience of the computer screen or the ebook. Foer’s commitment to the materiality of the printed book is genuine. His Tree of Codes, for example, experiments with different forms of typography and ways of reading. “On the brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of a book that can’t forget it has a body,” Foer said of the design (Heller 2010).
This romantic embrace of the materiality of print is striking because the literary community in the twentieth century had tended to downplay the look and feel of the book. The printed book was merely the instrument that conveyed the text to the reader. Paperbacks with mediocre typefaces, acidic paper, and cheap bindings characterized twentieth-century printing. Literary criticism itself isolated the idealized text from its material expression. During the 1950s and 1960s, the study of literature in the United States was dominated by the New Criticism, whose goal was to appreciate literary texts in their own right, as a structure of symbols independent of the conditions of production or the biography of the author. The critical approaches that followed—such as structuralism, semiotics, and poststructuralism— went even further in abstracting the text from its physical origins. These critical perspectives may have agreed about little else, but they all understood literature as a space of texts, not of paper and bindings.
Throughout this period, bibliography, the study of books as physical and cultural objects, was a highly specialized and limited academic discipline (Darnton 2009). Twentieth-century disinterest in the materiality of the book is in fact the continuation of a longer tradition. The very idea of copyright, which originated in the eighteenth century, emphasized the immateriality of the text. What was protected was the verbal expression of ideas, the words themselves. For the purposes of copyright, a book is the same book no matter what font its words appear in, no matter whether the pages are made of woodpulp or velum, and now by extension whether the words appear in an electronic reader or are stored on a disk drive. These are all emanations of some Platonic form of that book, and they are all protected, in theory if not practice.
Books in the twenty-first century
In 2011 a survey from the Pew Research Center contradicted the optimistic 2009 NEA report: around 20% of Americans had not read a book in the past year—printed book or ebook—and had not listened to an audio book. The figure of “nonreaders” was up from 8% in a Gallup survey of 1978 (Rainee 2011, 3), a time, of course, when there had been no ebooks. Sony marketed its first Reader using electrophoretic ink in Japan in 2004, and launched its Reader first on a larger scale in November, 2006. It was the release of Amazon’s Kindle a year later that suddenly constituted a readership for ebooks, and in three and a half years after the Kindle’s introduction, the revenue from all ebooks grew by a factor of almost 30 (Thompson 2011, 317). In many ways, the ebook was a mild remediation: the ebook was to the printed book what the DVD was to film. The DVD gave the viewer some new possibilities (deleted scenes, director’s commentary), but it remained essentially a convenient way to view a film at home rather than in the theater. The programmability of the DVD did not lead to a new genre of interactive cinema, although it might have. Now, after a short period of dominance, the DVD is losing ground to online streaming or downloading as a favorite way of consuming films. The Kindle and other ebook readers, which are in fact single-purpose computers, also offer a few new features: for example, the text is usually searchable and can sometimes be read aloud by a synthesized voice. But ebooks are still regarded as a convenient way to read the lines of traditional books in their intended order.
Nevertheless, the broad acceptance of the ebook has signaled a significant change in the attitude of users toward a medium that had remained fairly stable for decades or centuries. By the early sixteenth century, fifty years after Gutenberg’s first Bible, printed books had developed most of the characteristic features that they still possess, title page, tables of contents, consistent pagination, and significant white space around the text. (@need citation) The major material differences between a book printed in 2000 and one in 1600 lay in the choice of fonts, the use of wood pulp for paper, and cheap mass-produced bindings. (@citation and quote from LeFebre? others) As we have seen, the literary community has been insisting for years that the printed book makes for a more convenient and personal form of reading than the computer. The enthusiasts for print kept pointing out that you could not read your computer in bed. So it is ironic that in Pew’s 2011 survey the ebook edged out the printed book in this allegedly intimate act of reading: respondents preferred ebooks to printed books for reading in bed by 45% to 43%. In the first quarter of 2012, more ebooks outsold hardcovers and were eating into sales of paperbacks (Vaughan-Nichols, 2012).
Once again, the question to ask is not whether the printed book will disappear. The salient questions are what cultural roles each kind of book will fulfill and for which communities. With typical remediation, we sometimes give the name of books to newer digital forms. Al Gore’s Our Choice for the iPad, an elaborate multimedia application that integrates text, images, animations, and video, is called a book, and it is exactly the hybrid form that Foer fears will replace the printed book. Apple and others are producing templates for such multimedia “textbooks” for schools. We see the same phenomenon with the other traditional media: there is Internet radio and Internet television—digital remediations that appear to our culture to continue these traditions, but are consumed in significantly different ways than their analogue counterparts. With Internet radio and television, we are more likely than ever to listen or watch peripherally while working on other computer tasks or monitoring social media. Yet how many media critics worry about the harm that digital presentation might do to our concentrated viewing of television shows or careful listening to the radio? These media have never had the prestige of books or even film, and their presentation was always fragmented (at least in the United States) by advertising. Critics do worry that the reading we do online or in ebooks is different from the reading that characterized the late age of print.
Nevertheless, the broad acceptance of the ebook has signaled a significant change in the attitude of users toward a medium that had remained fairly stable for decades or centuries. By the early sixteenth century, fifty years after Gutenberg’s first Bible, printed books had developed most of the characteristic features that they still possess, title page, tables of contents, consistent pagination, and significant white space around the text. (@need citation) The major material differences between a book printed in 2000 and one in 1600 lay in the choice of fonts, the use of wood pulp for paper, and cheap mass-produced bindings. (@citation and quote from LeFebre? others) As we have seen, the literary community has been insisting for years that the printed book makes for a more convenient and personal form of reading than the computer. The enthusiasts for print kept pointing out that you could not read your computer in bed. So it is ironic that in Pew’s 2011 survey the ebook edged out the printed book in this allegedly intimate act of reading: respondents preferred ebooks to printed books for reading in bed by 45% to 43%. In the first quarter of 2012, more ebooks outsold hardcovers and were eating into sales of paperbacks (Vaughan-Nichols, 2012).
Once again, the question to ask is not whether the printed book will disappear. The salient questions are what cultural roles each kind of book will fulfill and for which communities. With typical remediation, we sometimes give the name of books to newer digital forms. Al Gore’s Our Choice for the iPad, an elaborate multimedia application that integrates text, images, animations, and video, is called a book, and it is exactly the hybrid form that Foer fears will replace the printed book. Apple and others are producing templates for such multimedia “textbooks” for schools. We see the same phenomenon with the other traditional media: there is Internet radio and Internet television—digital remediations that appear to our culture to continue these traditions, but are consumed in significantly different ways than their analogue counterparts. With Internet radio and television, we are more likely than ever to listen or watch peripherally while working on other computer tasks or monitoring social media. Yet how many media critics worry about the harm that digital presentation might do to our concentrated viewing of television shows or careful listening to the radio? These media have never had the prestige of books or even film, and their presentation was always fragmented (at least in the United States) by advertising. Critics do worry that the reading we do online or in ebooks is different from the reading that characterized the late age of print.
The death of reading
When printed books, magazines, and newspapers were central to our media culture in the twentieth century, there were clearly many different practices of reading (and writing). Huge literate populations (approaching 100% in the developed world) had different tastes and needs and read in all kinds of environments, superficially or carefully, quickly or at leisure. Yet those who fear the loss of print now seem to regard as essential one kind: contemplative or close reading. Umberto Eco also contributed to The Future of the Book (1996) and predicted that computers and printed books would continue to coexist:
“Books will remain indispensable not only for literature, but for any circumstance in which one needs to read carefully, not only to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it...It seems to me that computers are diffusing a new form of literacy but are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating. In my periods of optimism I dream of a computer generation which, compelled to read a computer screen, gets acquainted with reading from a screen, but at a certain moment feels unsatisfied and looks for a different, more relaxed, and differently-committing form of reading.” (Eco 1996, page @)
Eco claimed that digital technology does not allow for reflective reading. Eight years later, as we saw, the Dana Goia of the National Endowment for the Arts wrote of the “irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation” fostered by print. More recently, when practices of digital reading had become much more widespread, Nicholas Carr still agreed. The Shallows (2010) describes the changes in the way we process information through our digital devices and Internet services. These new media encourage us to multitask, as they present us with constantly changing streams of information. They interrupt and distract us: "As McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." (p. 6) Carr cited the psychologist Maryanne Wolf, who argued that print literacy wires the brain for “deep reading” and online reading does not (Wolf and Barzillai 2009). Her work gives apparent scientific support to what Carr, Eco, Goia, Foer and other humanists believe: that in the age of printed books reflection and contemplation were fostered and that reflective reading remains vital and cannot be supplied by digital media.
Reflective reading is a practice of amateurs, of lovers of books, who envision reading under a tree, in silent conversation with the author. “Close reading,” the professional scholar’s equivalent of reflective reading, has always suggested the reading of literary texts in a systematic fashion (the systems vary, Culler, 2010; Guillory ADE 149 2010) and with attention to every detail of language and expression. This was regarded as the essential first step in interpretation. Recently some are claiming that digital technology enables new forms of reading and therefore new methods of interpretation. For Katherine Hayles (2010) two new forms, hypertext reading and machine reading, now join close reading in the repertoire. Hypertext reading is the unrealized dream of a new form of communication that the computer would make possible. In its radical version (the hypertextual novel or essay), it never came to pass. In the form of linked pages on the World Wide Web, it has become the single most popular form of digital communication, but not as a form of scholarship. Machine reading is the digital processing of texts—for example, searching large bodes of text (say, all the digitized texts of nineteenth-century American authors) various words or phrases, revealing patterns that no human close reading could discover.
That is precisely the problem for literary scholars committed to any of the approaches of the twentieth century. Jonathan Culler writes:
Reflective reading is a practice of amateurs, of lovers of books, who envision reading under a tree, in silent conversation with the author. “Close reading,” the professional scholar’s equivalent of reflective reading, has always suggested the reading of literary texts in a systematic fashion (the systems vary, Culler, 2010; Guillory ADE 149 2010) and with attention to every detail of language and expression. This was regarded as the essential first step in interpretation. Recently some are claiming that digital technology enables new forms of reading and therefore new methods of interpretation. For Katherine Hayles (2010) two new forms, hypertext reading and machine reading, now join close reading in the repertoire. Hypertext reading is the unrealized dream of a new form of communication that the computer would make possible. In its radical version (the hypertextual novel or essay), it never came to pass. In the form of linked pages on the World Wide Web, it has become the single most popular form of digital communication, but not as a form of scholarship. Machine reading is the digital processing of texts—for example, searching large bodes of text (say, all the digitized texts of nineteenth-century American authors) various words or phrases, revealing patterns that no human close reading could discover.
That is precisely the problem for literary scholars committed to any of the approaches of the twentieth century. Jonathan Culler writes:
It may be especially important to reflect on the varieties of close reading and even to propose explicit models, in an age where electronic resources make it possible to do literary research without reading at all: find all the instances of the words beg and beggar in novels by two different authors and write up your conclusions. (24; also cited by Hayles, 73)
Stanley Fish is equally skeptical:
“...whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.” (2012)
Fish and Culler probably still speak for the majority of writers and critics, who understand close or reflective reading as the paradigm of literate culture. Whether for scholarship or personal engagement, reflective reading constitutes a way of knowing, and it becomes process of the self-definition, especially for scholars. This is what Carr is suggesting, perhaps unwittingly, when he claims that Google is rearranging our brains.
What the traditional literary community sees as the devaluation of reading, others see as a new beginning. Digital humanists believe that a new kind of scholarship is demanded in an age in which popular forms of reading and writing have moved online. “Reading has not declined in significance in contemporary Western culture, but it has increasingly moved online, where it has taken on an increasingly social, increasingly active form…” Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes (2012, 51). We are all familiar with this new form in social media, where reading and writing come together: the blog, the twitter feed, comments on Facebook pages. In the second half of this book, we will explore the massive, collective practices of social media, which dwarf in scale any other form of reading and writing we have known. But it is only fair to acknowledge that this new form is immediate, ephemeral, and superficial; it does not invite contemplative reading. Because social media combine text, images, audio, and video and present themselves to each in multiple windows and dynamic, they invite the user instead to what Maria Engberg characterizes as a polyaesthetic form of reading. So the critics of social media are right in insisting on its superficiality. Their mistake is to fail to understand the nature of media communities today. Their form of reading need not disappear, as long as the (traditional) literary community continues to practice it. But it can no longer constitute a cultural ideal of reading, to which everyone must or should aspire.
What the traditional literary community sees as the devaluation of reading, others see as a new beginning. Digital humanists believe that a new kind of scholarship is demanded in an age in which popular forms of reading and writing have moved online. “Reading has not declined in significance in contemporary Western culture, but it has increasingly moved online, where it has taken on an increasingly social, increasingly active form…” Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes (2012, 51). We are all familiar with this new form in social media, where reading and writing come together: the blog, the twitter feed, comments on Facebook pages. In the second half of this book, we will explore the massive, collective practices of social media, which dwarf in scale any other form of reading and writing we have known. But it is only fair to acknowledge that this new form is immediate, ephemeral, and superficial; it does not invite contemplative reading. Because social media combine text, images, audio, and video and present themselves to each in multiple windows and dynamic, they invite the user instead to what Maria Engberg characterizes as a polyaesthetic form of reading. So the critics of social media are right in insisting on its superficiality. Their mistake is to fail to understand the nature of media communities today. Their form of reading need not disappear, as long as the (traditional) literary community continues to practice it. But it can no longer constitute a cultural ideal of reading, to which everyone must or should aspire.
The sanctity of the book
“...a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers chose The Lord of the Rings as the greatest book not merely of the century but of the millennium” (O’Hehir 2001)
Whether or not our brains are being rewired, it seems clear that enormous digital communities are thinking of the world of texts differently. Although the Web did not give us the hypertext novel or essay, it does now offer us unprecedented access to texts (and images and videos) of all sorts. Ted Nelson was on the right track when he asserted that global hypertext would give rise to a sense of liberation. Infinite fields of texts are available to be downloaded, appropriated, taken apart, added to, or ignored—whatever the reader, now also a writer, wishes. The problem is to find the desired text in the plenitude; once found, the text is open for any use. This combination of reading and rewriting is the antithesis of close reading, above all, because it does not respect the sanctity of the original text nor care about its place in a traditional canon.
These new practices can lead to casual appropriation without any concern for copyright or authorship. Yet what is happening to intellectual property in books and all other media forms illustrates the contradictions of our media culture—radically changing and yet unwilling to let go of the assumptions of an earlier age. Developing gradually in the age of print, copyright was first applied exclusively to printed materials and then extended to the newer media of recorded music, film, and television. The notion that an author owns the expression of his or her ideas comported both economically and intellectually with the fixed technology of printing. Before the invention of xerographic copying machines in the mid-twentieth century, a printed book was relatively difficult to copy. Because making a book was capital intensive, established publishers supported by legal sanctions could hope to control production and distribution (although there was a great deal of piracy even in the nineteenth century). The cultural ideals of authorship, originality, and creativity that solidified in the nineteenth century, as explained in Shiner’s Invention of Art (2001) that we discussed earlier, also fit nicely with the growing economic importance of publication—all to suggest that the authored text was special, sacrosanct. Throughout the twentieth century, the recording, television, and film industries exerted their influence to strengthen the legal claims of copyright. As a result, claims are routinely made today for intellectual property that would have seemed utterly absurd fifty or a hundred years ago. Quoting ten seconds of a melody in your song can get you sued, as can retelling the story of Gone with the Wind from the perspective of a slave on Scarlett's plantation.
As quickly as technological barriers to copying have fallen away, they have been reinstated in ways that appear artificial and arbitrary: encryption, the notorious region codes for DVDs, digital watermarks on images, and so on. Because digital copying seems so natural, it becomes hard to believe that it is wrong, and the laws that are passed to make copyright infringement a crime are widely ignored. Pirate movements in Sweden and Germany have come to challenge the criminalization of digital copying directly, but so far with little success. Yet, as Lawrence Lessig (2008) has argued, sampling and remixing have become the natural impulse of broad communities, especially of young users. Millions of people in North American and Europe now hold confused and contradictory versions of earlier cultural assumptions about authorship and originality.
The ability to play in the plenitude of online materials and to copy and change texts that we find suggests not only that texts are not immutable, but also that no particular text or set of texts is necessary. In the last century, our literary and educational institutions insisted that certain texts had to be read, that certain authors were vital. Such hierarchies, we have seen repeatedly, were breaking down well before digital technologies gave us word processing and the Web. But the dynamic media forms created in the period from the 1980s to the 2000s have certainly facilitated the breakdown. Even high schools and universities, who remained conservatively tied to the printed book throughout this period, are slowly beginning to respond to new attitudes toward reading and writing. The Internet, meanwhile, makes it easier to bypass the institutions altogether.
American fan culture predated the widespread use of the Internet (Jenkins 1992). But in the past twenty years, as we discussed in Chapter 2, the Web has offered the huge fan communities for cross media fiction (Star Trek, Star Wars, Twilight, and so on) a platform to practice a kind of DIY literary, film or television criticism. Without the Web, fans were not able to communicate as easily with each other, and the prevailing hierarchy of literature meant that their fan fiction went unnoticed. Now fan communities can publish their work online without the gate-keeping that goes on in the academic world. Their work ignores and is ignored by most traditional film and literary scholars in universities. In the digital plenitude these enormous groups of amateurs neither need nor infringe upon the much smaller group of professionals.
Fan work has its own standards and styles. It is often participatory and practical, as fans write (or even shoot videos of) their own narratives, which may extend or contradict the canonical stories of their beloved Star Trek or Twilight. This kind of original production is very rare in the academic community itself, of course, except in cases where a university has a resident poet or novelist. By coalescing into digital communities, fans become more visible and more confident in constructing alternate literary histories. Fan culture feels the popular modernist impulse: fans do not necessarily want to abolish literary hierarchy, but to insert their favorites in it. Many of them assert the Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, or Lost are great literature. A poll conducted by Amazon in 1999, even before the Peter Jackson film trilogy, found Lord of the Rings to be the best book not only of the century, but the millennium. Relatively few literary academics would put Tolkien’s novels in their canon of great literature, for in their community it belongs to a different category.
The hierarchies of the professional humanities, meanwhile, have changed, but not disappeared. Within literature departments in the United States, for example, despite decades of debate over new approaches and the inclusion of authors from excluded groups (women, African-American, Hispanics), there has been considerable continuity in the authors that students and scholars are expected to read. Once again, the digital plenitude does not eliminate hierarchy. Intellectual communities and interest groups will have their own authors who must be read. But the sense of a shared hierarchy has disappeared: there is no longer a foundation of knowledge that all these communities agree on.
These new practices can lead to casual appropriation without any concern for copyright or authorship. Yet what is happening to intellectual property in books and all other media forms illustrates the contradictions of our media culture—radically changing and yet unwilling to let go of the assumptions of an earlier age. Developing gradually in the age of print, copyright was first applied exclusively to printed materials and then extended to the newer media of recorded music, film, and television. The notion that an author owns the expression of his or her ideas comported both economically and intellectually with the fixed technology of printing. Before the invention of xerographic copying machines in the mid-twentieth century, a printed book was relatively difficult to copy. Because making a book was capital intensive, established publishers supported by legal sanctions could hope to control production and distribution (although there was a great deal of piracy even in the nineteenth century). The cultural ideals of authorship, originality, and creativity that solidified in the nineteenth century, as explained in Shiner’s Invention of Art (2001) that we discussed earlier, also fit nicely with the growing economic importance of publication—all to suggest that the authored text was special, sacrosanct. Throughout the twentieth century, the recording, television, and film industries exerted their influence to strengthen the legal claims of copyright. As a result, claims are routinely made today for intellectual property that would have seemed utterly absurd fifty or a hundred years ago. Quoting ten seconds of a melody in your song can get you sued, as can retelling the story of Gone with the Wind from the perspective of a slave on Scarlett's plantation.
As quickly as technological barriers to copying have fallen away, they have been reinstated in ways that appear artificial and arbitrary: encryption, the notorious region codes for DVDs, digital watermarks on images, and so on. Because digital copying seems so natural, it becomes hard to believe that it is wrong, and the laws that are passed to make copyright infringement a crime are widely ignored. Pirate movements in Sweden and Germany have come to challenge the criminalization of digital copying directly, but so far with little success. Yet, as Lawrence Lessig (2008) has argued, sampling and remixing have become the natural impulse of broad communities, especially of young users. Millions of people in North American and Europe now hold confused and contradictory versions of earlier cultural assumptions about authorship and originality.
The ability to play in the plenitude of online materials and to copy and change texts that we find suggests not only that texts are not immutable, but also that no particular text or set of texts is necessary. In the last century, our literary and educational institutions insisted that certain texts had to be read, that certain authors were vital. Such hierarchies, we have seen repeatedly, were breaking down well before digital technologies gave us word processing and the Web. But the dynamic media forms created in the period from the 1980s to the 2000s have certainly facilitated the breakdown. Even high schools and universities, who remained conservatively tied to the printed book throughout this period, are slowly beginning to respond to new attitudes toward reading and writing. The Internet, meanwhile, makes it easier to bypass the institutions altogether.
American fan culture predated the widespread use of the Internet (Jenkins 1992). But in the past twenty years, as we discussed in Chapter 2, the Web has offered the huge fan communities for cross media fiction (Star Trek, Star Wars, Twilight, and so on) a platform to practice a kind of DIY literary, film or television criticism. Without the Web, fans were not able to communicate as easily with each other, and the prevailing hierarchy of literature meant that their fan fiction went unnoticed. Now fan communities can publish their work online without the gate-keeping that goes on in the academic world. Their work ignores and is ignored by most traditional film and literary scholars in universities. In the digital plenitude these enormous groups of amateurs neither need nor infringe upon the much smaller group of professionals.
Fan work has its own standards and styles. It is often participatory and practical, as fans write (or even shoot videos of) their own narratives, which may extend or contradict the canonical stories of their beloved Star Trek or Twilight. This kind of original production is very rare in the academic community itself, of course, except in cases where a university has a resident poet or novelist. By coalescing into digital communities, fans become more visible and more confident in constructing alternate literary histories. Fan culture feels the popular modernist impulse: fans do not necessarily want to abolish literary hierarchy, but to insert their favorites in it. Many of them assert the Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, or Lost are great literature. A poll conducted by Amazon in 1999, even before the Peter Jackson film trilogy, found Lord of the Rings to be the best book not only of the century, but the millennium. Relatively few literary academics would put Tolkien’s novels in their canon of great literature, for in their community it belongs to a different category.
The hierarchies of the professional humanities, meanwhile, have changed, but not disappeared. Within literature departments in the United States, for example, despite decades of debate over new approaches and the inclusion of authors from excluded groups (women, African-American, Hispanics), there has been considerable continuity in the authors that students and scholars are expected to read. Once again, the digital plenitude does not eliminate hierarchy. Intellectual communities and interest groups will have their own authors who must be read. But the sense of a shared hierarchy has disappeared: there is no longer a foundation of knowledge that all these communities agree on.
The encyclopedia and the library
In so far as the World Wide Web serves as a paradigm for the structuring of knowledge in our media culture, it strongly suggests that these structures are local or temporary. In this sense Wikipedia is a paradigm for the digital plenitude. Wikipedia is an surprisingly novel version of a very old kind of book. Encyclopedic traditions existed in ancient Greece and Rome, in Medieval Europe, and throughout the modern world, and each tradition had its own culturally appropriate organizations. Some medieval encyclopedists used the seven liberal arts as an organizing principle (Martianus Capella in the fifth century) or the seven days of Creation according to the Bible (Vincent of Beauvais in the 13th century). Modern encyclopedias since the French Encyclopédie in the eighteenth have relied on alphabetical order for their articles, because scientific knowledge had become too vast and specialized to permit organization according to one of the medieval principles. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the last great English language encyclopedia, tried to create a more complex tiered structure (Propaedia, Micropaedia, Macropaedia) for its 32 large volumes. In 2012, it announced that this edition would be its last printed version.
Wikipedia is an electronic remediation of the printed encyclopedia, and in fact a respectful one. Wikipedia offers a set of guidelines for its tens of thousands of contributors, and these guidelines constitute a digitally appropriate but still rather conservative interpretation of how to codify knowledge. Articles that follow the style guidelines are written in a series of subheadings that lay out their organization. They can be read from beginning to end, just as an article in a twentieth-century Britannica, but they can be shot through with links to other articles or external websites. There are also thousands of contributor-defined lists and list articles that link other articles by time, location, scientific category, and so on. In this way Wikipedia gives us a view of the digital plenitude as a set of local hierarchies joined together into a globally democratic and completely disorganized network.
Two related aspects of Wikipedia confirm this view. First, there is the sheer size and scope of the encyclopedia. According to Wikipedia’s article on itself, the total project includes approximately 26 million articles in 286 languages, reflecting the contemporary interests of their authors and of segments of our media culture (and in this respect Wikipedia is firmly in the encyclopedic tradition). There are articles of considerable scientific sophistication (in mathematics or linguistics, for example), and there are articles on all the usual subjects: canonically great authors or historical figures. But many other topics are represented in a detail that they have never enjoyed in any print encyclopedia. Programming and scripting languages are meticulously described, as are individual computers and operating systems, such the Apple Mac and Linux. There must be thousands of entries on the genres and individual titles of videogames. The Halo game series has an article running to over 11,000 words, including references. The main article on Star Wars is about 9000 words and links to a dozen subsidiary articles including: “Star Wars canon,” “List of Star Wars Creatures,” and “Comparison of Star Wars and Star Trek.” Older elite culture is also represented: the article on Richard Wagner is about 14,000 words. Because the size of Wikipedia is effectively unlimited, the contributors no longer face what was the most difficult work of encyclopedia editing—deciding what to eliminate. Wikipedia editors eliminate articles that violate policies, but they do not have to weigh the inclusion of one good article against another. Wikipedia is freer than any previous encyclopedia to validate the vision of its writers and readers about what knowledge belongs (the criterion Wikipedia calls “notability”). In this, Wikipedia captures perfectly the collapse of the cultural hierarchy of the twentieth century.
Wikipedia embodies that collapse through its most radical feature: that it is “open-source,” written by anyone in the Internet community who wishes to participate. This was the vision of Jimmy Wales and his collaborators, and it is remarkable that it is so successful. While the Britannica boasted Noble prize winners among its expert editors, Wikipedia’s volunteers produce scientific articles that (despite the carping) at least rival the quality of printed encyclopedias (Giles 2005). These articles float in a sea of articles about videogames, hobbies, obscure organizations, and whatever else satisfies the standard of notability for some group. The overall result is to insist on the equal importance of formerly elite and popular cultural forms. Other social hierarchies may still be inscribed in Wikipedia’s structure: research suggests that a relatively small number of male writers from the United States have contributed the majority of articles (Cohen 2011). There are all sorts of biasses to which Wikipedia may fall prey, but the cultural elitism of the twentieth century is not one.
While the encyclopedia condenses knowledge into one book, its counterpart, the library, take the opposite approach, collecting as many volumes as possible and organizing them for our access. The national and university libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the industrial age of print, were themselves dealing with a glut of materials. In fact, it is fair to ask whether the universe of print was not already a plenitude. Someone sitting in the Reading Room of the Library of Congress in, say 1950, confronted a portal to millions of printed books. (In 1950 the Library of Congress already held @xxx copies.) No one could claim to have assimilated more than a tiny fraction of this world of printed books. And even to call the library a world of print is misleading because there was already an important mix of media including manuscripts, photographs, and radio, film, and television recordings. However, the size and diversity of media culture then did not seem to weigh as heavily.
Libraries in the age of print were hierarchically organized in a way to suggest that a reader could master a subject. Rows of drawers held cards in alphabetical order to provide access to the books, and the books themselves were arranged by subject and author in the stacks. The tangible presence of the catalogues gave the impression of order and comprehensibility for books and the knowledge they contained. Most books were themselves constructed as a hierarchy of chapters, and the contents of each book was stable. Even though the sheer amount of material would overwhelm any single reader, the institutions and practices of print helped to inspire a sense that the universe of knowledge was in order. On the collective scale the library and on the individual scale encyclopedias, handbooks, bibliographies, and textbooks all contributed to the sense of order.
The compulsion to order knowledge, to insist on a center, is built into the architecture of the Reading Room of the Library of Congress with its concentric rings of desks. (@linkSee fig. 1) The Library began long ago extending this compulsion to other media such photographs and audio recordings:
Wikipedia is an electronic remediation of the printed encyclopedia, and in fact a respectful one. Wikipedia offers a set of guidelines for its tens of thousands of contributors, and these guidelines constitute a digitally appropriate but still rather conservative interpretation of how to codify knowledge. Articles that follow the style guidelines are written in a series of subheadings that lay out their organization. They can be read from beginning to end, just as an article in a twentieth-century Britannica, but they can be shot through with links to other articles or external websites. There are also thousands of contributor-defined lists and list articles that link other articles by time, location, scientific category, and so on. In this way Wikipedia gives us a view of the digital plenitude as a set of local hierarchies joined together into a globally democratic and completely disorganized network.
Two related aspects of Wikipedia confirm this view. First, there is the sheer size and scope of the encyclopedia. According to Wikipedia’s article on itself, the total project includes approximately 26 million articles in 286 languages, reflecting the contemporary interests of their authors and of segments of our media culture (and in this respect Wikipedia is firmly in the encyclopedic tradition). There are articles of considerable scientific sophistication (in mathematics or linguistics, for example), and there are articles on all the usual subjects: canonically great authors or historical figures. But many other topics are represented in a detail that they have never enjoyed in any print encyclopedia. Programming and scripting languages are meticulously described, as are individual computers and operating systems, such the Apple Mac and Linux. There must be thousands of entries on the genres and individual titles of videogames. The Halo game series has an article running to over 11,000 words, including references. The main article on Star Wars is about 9000 words and links to a dozen subsidiary articles including: “Star Wars canon,” “List of Star Wars Creatures,” and “Comparison of Star Wars and Star Trek.” Older elite culture is also represented: the article on Richard Wagner is about 14,000 words. Because the size of Wikipedia is effectively unlimited, the contributors no longer face what was the most difficult work of encyclopedia editing—deciding what to eliminate. Wikipedia editors eliminate articles that violate policies, but they do not have to weigh the inclusion of one good article against another. Wikipedia is freer than any previous encyclopedia to validate the vision of its writers and readers about what knowledge belongs (the criterion Wikipedia calls “notability”). In this, Wikipedia captures perfectly the collapse of the cultural hierarchy of the twentieth century.
Wikipedia embodies that collapse through its most radical feature: that it is “open-source,” written by anyone in the Internet community who wishes to participate. This was the vision of Jimmy Wales and his collaborators, and it is remarkable that it is so successful. While the Britannica boasted Noble prize winners among its expert editors, Wikipedia’s volunteers produce scientific articles that (despite the carping) at least rival the quality of printed encyclopedias (Giles 2005). These articles float in a sea of articles about videogames, hobbies, obscure organizations, and whatever else satisfies the standard of notability for some group. The overall result is to insist on the equal importance of formerly elite and popular cultural forms. Other social hierarchies may still be inscribed in Wikipedia’s structure: research suggests that a relatively small number of male writers from the United States have contributed the majority of articles (Cohen 2011). There are all sorts of biasses to which Wikipedia may fall prey, but the cultural elitism of the twentieth century is not one.
While the encyclopedia condenses knowledge into one book, its counterpart, the library, take the opposite approach, collecting as many volumes as possible and organizing them for our access. The national and university libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the industrial age of print, were themselves dealing with a glut of materials. In fact, it is fair to ask whether the universe of print was not already a plenitude. Someone sitting in the Reading Room of the Library of Congress in, say 1950, confronted a portal to millions of printed books. (In 1950 the Library of Congress already held @xxx copies.) No one could claim to have assimilated more than a tiny fraction of this world of printed books. And even to call the library a world of print is misleading because there was already an important mix of media including manuscripts, photographs, and radio, film, and television recordings. However, the size and diversity of media culture then did not seem to weigh as heavily.
Libraries in the age of print were hierarchically organized in a way to suggest that a reader could master a subject. Rows of drawers held cards in alphabetical order to provide access to the books, and the books themselves were arranged by subject and author in the stacks. The tangible presence of the catalogues gave the impression of order and comprehensibility for books and the knowledge they contained. Most books were themselves constructed as a hierarchy of chapters, and the contents of each book was stable. Even though the sheer amount of material would overwhelm any single reader, the institutions and practices of print helped to inspire a sense that the universe of knowledge was in order. On the collective scale the library and on the individual scale encyclopedias, handbooks, bibliographies, and textbooks all contributed to the sense of order.
The compulsion to order knowledge, to insist on a center, is built into the architecture of the Reading Room of the Library of Congress with its concentric rings of desks. (@linkSee fig. 1) The Library began long ago extending this compulsion to other media such photographs and audio recordings:
Today's Library of Congress is an unparalleled world resource. The collection of more than 155 million items includes more than 35 million cataloged books and other print materials in 460 languages; more than 68 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America; and the world's largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings. (Library of Congress Website, 2013)
The goal here is to incorporate all media materials that attain a certain level of historical or cultural status—all captured and made subject to “authority control.” Every artifact finds its proper virtual as well as physical place in this ordered world. The historian Anthony Grafton (2009) has described this vision of the library:
… the traditional citadel of manuscript and print, closed and guarded, a hierarchical structure as neatly ordered as a vast set of display cabinets for butterflies. Its expert librarians pin every document, book, and journal in the collection in its proper place, the precise category in which equally expert researchers will be sure to find it. They and their bosses assume that true knowledge exists between the covers of books and journals—those books and journals that have an acknowledged place in the world of scholarship. (88)
Grafton, however, calls this a stereotype that does not fit the facts of contemporary libraries, and he is right. The Library of Congress, the British Library, the National Library of France, and so on are monumental buildings, which are now coming to house digital as well as physical collections. But as they move to absorb more and more digital materials, they still understand the world of information in terms of the previous paradigm.
The contemporary library community finds itself subject to contradictory impulses: the desire for order and hierarchy and the desire to be complete in an era of digital plenitude. The Library of Congress confronts just this contradiction, as it decides whether and how to accommodate waves of digital material. There are technical challenges in capturing and preserving the texts of 175 to 200 million blogs, the three to six thousand tweets per second, or the 100 hours YouTube videos uploaded each minute (Twitter 2011; Nielsen 2012; YouTube 2013; all figures are guaranteed to be out of date). The greater challenge is to bring the material “under control.” In 2010 the Library of Congress announced its agreement with Twitter to capture all public tweets; it was @ years until the database could be made available for researchers even on a trial basis. Meanwhile, the LOC Web Archives (2013) project has been going on for a decade:
The contemporary library community finds itself subject to contradictory impulses: the desire for order and hierarchy and the desire to be complete in an era of digital plenitude. The Library of Congress confronts just this contradiction, as it decides whether and how to accommodate waves of digital material. There are technical challenges in capturing and preserving the texts of 175 to 200 million blogs, the three to six thousand tweets per second, or the 100 hours YouTube videos uploaded each minute (Twitter 2011; Nielsen 2012; YouTube 2013; all figures are guaranteed to be out of date). The greater challenge is to bring the material “under control.” In 2010 the Library of Congress announced its agreement with Twitter to capture all public tweets; it was @ years until the database could be made available for researchers even on a trial basis. Meanwhile, the LOC Web Archives (2013) project has been going on for a decade:
The Library of Congress Web Archives (LCWA) is composed of collections of archived web sites selected by subject specialists to represent web-based information on a designated topic. It is part of a continuing effort by the Library to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve digital materials for future generations of researchers.” (Library of Congress Website 2013
When the Library seeks to evaluate, select, and catalog for purposes of research, it is seeking to bring the digital world under the scholarly system that developed in the age of print.
The alternative is the fully digital library, which has no physical presence at all. Just as ebooks are an increasingly popular remediation of the printed book, digital libraries are increasingly important attempts to refashion the great book of the library for our current media culture. Beginning in 2004, Google undertook to digitize books on a vast scale: 30 million volumes as of 2013 (Darnton, 2013). Google also tried to negotiate an agreement with major publishers to make complete texts available to libraries and individuals, but the American courts blocked this arrangement because it was deemed unfair to the original copyright owners. There are many other initiatives for digital libraries of varying size and at various stages of preparation. Europeana is an aggregator for the digital materials of many European countries. An American initiative, the Digital Public Library of America, will link together collections provided by major public and academic libraries. It opposes Google’s commercial library service with a digital library as a public good (Darnton, 2013).
It remains to be seen how the DPLA, Europeana, or other digital services will coordinate with their physical counterparts. The purpose of even the greatest physical library is always to be exclusive as well as comprehensive. Exclusivity comes not only because of the problems of space, although physical libraries are usually struggling to find shelf space for all their books. It is also part of the paradigm defined by print. There are gatekeepers throughout the system to determine which authors should get their texts into print and which printed books should be taken seriously enough to be kept in the library. It is not obvious that electronic publishing will adopt those same gate-keeping functions. What should these ambitious digital libraries include and exclude? Should they resist the digital “creep” that leads to the incorporation of more and more materials that exist beyond the limits of the current system of publication and validation (just as Wikipedia includes more and more fragments of the digital plenitude that would never be found in a printed encyclopedia). If books published by recognized publishers belong in the DPLA, what about digital books self-published by individuals? The definition of the book itself becomes unstable, confirming Foer’s fear that books would become multimedia experiences. Why should a great digital library exclude these? If the Library of Congress itself houses physical copies of some films, why should not all films and television series become part of the digital library? If 170 billion public tweets are now in a Library of Congress database (Gross 2013), why not all amateur YouTube videos and tens of millions of Instagram photos?
A digital library service can be tailored to one’s preferences. Most of the 10 million or more who consult the Wikipedia each day are neither interested in nor presumably disturbed by the millions of pages devoted to videogames and other popular subjects; at the same time they are not indignant over articles on specialized topics in art or science. The Wikipedia that we each know is the one defined by our own searches. The same would be true of a digital library, where each individual reader’s own community can appear as the center of her view of the library. However, the presence of all these different kinds of texts and media and the inevitable links into the endless websites all work against the sense of order and stability that the print library fostered.
In this sense, at least, the Google book project defines a library of the future more radical than the Digital Public Library of America. Google books is a library only in the root sense that it collects books and provides them to readers. As an institution for the organization and sanctioning of knowledge, it is a kind of anti-library, whose organization is ad hoc and whose mechanisms of control are minimal. Even though it draws its resources from library collections, Google books is ultimately the expression of a technology company and its technocratic creators—voracious and completely agnostic is in its desire to suck up and display all kinds of digital data. The evolving interfaces of the DPLA, on the other hand, are designed to support the work of digital humanists by providing tools for visualization, for “looking down” across the collections for scholarly patterns, searching for order in the plenitude (Fig. 2).
@Search results for railroad in Digital Public Library of America’s Timeline
Google Books, at least in its current form, encourages users to conduct simple, flat searches for words and phrases. There is no sense of scholarly structures—no distinction between serious books and popular ones, between the latest research and books that are decades out of date. The copyright issue (a powerful economic holdover from the age of print) means that the only full texts available are volumes from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, yellowed pages often decorated with pencilled notes from a reader who died before the first computer was ever turned on. These pages hint at a complicated bibliographic history that Google, unlike the DPLA, has no particular concern to preserve. Google Books is almost seamlessly integrated into Google Play, an online store that sells music, books videos and apps. When you search for a book, you are often offered the opportunity to buy it.
There is a separate interface called Google Scholar—the url for people who happen to be interested in traditional academic subjects, rather than popular ones. It is one massive (and free) service among many commercial or non-profit collections of citations, abstracts, and articles (such as Scopus, the Web of Knowledge, JSTOR, and Project Muse). Even among these services, the order of knowledge has changed. In lieu of the older hierarchies, for example, Google Scholar offers its own evaluation tool: the h5-index, an automatic ranking of articles based on factors such as the number of times cited and the publication journal. The hierarchies generated by such ranking systems are dynamic; they change as the article is cited more or less often over time. They also tacitly acknowledge the plenitude of texts in which they function, as each community of scholars will cite (link to) articles in their own discipline, while some articles will gain in status by garnering citations across several communities.
The alternative is the fully digital library, which has no physical presence at all. Just as ebooks are an increasingly popular remediation of the printed book, digital libraries are increasingly important attempts to refashion the great book of the library for our current media culture. Beginning in 2004, Google undertook to digitize books on a vast scale: 30 million volumes as of 2013 (Darnton, 2013). Google also tried to negotiate an agreement with major publishers to make complete texts available to libraries and individuals, but the American courts blocked this arrangement because it was deemed unfair to the original copyright owners. There are many other initiatives for digital libraries of varying size and at various stages of preparation. Europeana is an aggregator for the digital materials of many European countries. An American initiative, the Digital Public Library of America, will link together collections provided by major public and academic libraries. It opposes Google’s commercial library service with a digital library as a public good (Darnton, 2013).
It remains to be seen how the DPLA, Europeana, or other digital services will coordinate with their physical counterparts. The purpose of even the greatest physical library is always to be exclusive as well as comprehensive. Exclusivity comes not only because of the problems of space, although physical libraries are usually struggling to find shelf space for all their books. It is also part of the paradigm defined by print. There are gatekeepers throughout the system to determine which authors should get their texts into print and which printed books should be taken seriously enough to be kept in the library. It is not obvious that electronic publishing will adopt those same gate-keeping functions. What should these ambitious digital libraries include and exclude? Should they resist the digital “creep” that leads to the incorporation of more and more materials that exist beyond the limits of the current system of publication and validation (just as Wikipedia includes more and more fragments of the digital plenitude that would never be found in a printed encyclopedia). If books published by recognized publishers belong in the DPLA, what about digital books self-published by individuals? The definition of the book itself becomes unstable, confirming Foer’s fear that books would become multimedia experiences. Why should a great digital library exclude these? If the Library of Congress itself houses physical copies of some films, why should not all films and television series become part of the digital library? If 170 billion public tweets are now in a Library of Congress database (Gross 2013), why not all amateur YouTube videos and tens of millions of Instagram photos?
A digital library service can be tailored to one’s preferences. Most of the 10 million or more who consult the Wikipedia each day are neither interested in nor presumably disturbed by the millions of pages devoted to videogames and other popular subjects; at the same time they are not indignant over articles on specialized topics in art or science. The Wikipedia that we each know is the one defined by our own searches. The same would be true of a digital library, where each individual reader’s own community can appear as the center of her view of the library. However, the presence of all these different kinds of texts and media and the inevitable links into the endless websites all work against the sense of order and stability that the print library fostered.
In this sense, at least, the Google book project defines a library of the future more radical than the Digital Public Library of America. Google books is a library only in the root sense that it collects books and provides them to readers. As an institution for the organization and sanctioning of knowledge, it is a kind of anti-library, whose organization is ad hoc and whose mechanisms of control are minimal. Even though it draws its resources from library collections, Google books is ultimately the expression of a technology company and its technocratic creators—voracious and completely agnostic is in its desire to suck up and display all kinds of digital data. The evolving interfaces of the DPLA, on the other hand, are designed to support the work of digital humanists by providing tools for visualization, for “looking down” across the collections for scholarly patterns, searching for order in the plenitude (Fig. 2).
@Search results for railroad in Digital Public Library of America’s Timeline
Google Books, at least in its current form, encourages users to conduct simple, flat searches for words and phrases. There is no sense of scholarly structures—no distinction between serious books and popular ones, between the latest research and books that are decades out of date. The copyright issue (a powerful economic holdover from the age of print) means that the only full texts available are volumes from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, yellowed pages often decorated with pencilled notes from a reader who died before the first computer was ever turned on. These pages hint at a complicated bibliographic history that Google, unlike the DPLA, has no particular concern to preserve. Google Books is almost seamlessly integrated into Google Play, an online store that sells music, books videos and apps. When you search for a book, you are often offered the opportunity to buy it.
There is a separate interface called Google Scholar—the url for people who happen to be interested in traditional academic subjects, rather than popular ones. It is one massive (and free) service among many commercial or non-profit collections of citations, abstracts, and articles (such as Scopus, the Web of Knowledge, JSTOR, and Project Muse). Even among these services, the order of knowledge has changed. In lieu of the older hierarchies, for example, Google Scholar offers its own evaluation tool: the h5-index, an automatic ranking of articles based on factors such as the number of times cited and the publication journal. The hierarchies generated by such ranking systems are dynamic; they change as the article is cited more or less often over time. They also tacitly acknowledge the plenitude of texts in which they function, as each community of scholars will cite (link to) articles in their own discipline, while some articles will gain in status by garnering citations across several communities.
The analogue and the digital university
Futurologists have been predicting for decades that digital media would revolutionize education and replace the university, an institution of scholarship founded on the book, first in manuscript and then in printed form. (@examples) The PC was introduced to the university as to the business world in the 1980s, and universities have generally had early access to digital media technologies, for one reason because computer science and electrical engineering departments played key roles in these innovations. With that background, we might expect that the university would have radically changed in the past three decades. The changes in education and research through digital media have been both profound and modest. Lectures, seminars and labs are still the standard modes of instruction. Discrete courses are still offered, taught by professors and graduate students. Despite efforts at interdisciplinarity, the intellectual life of almost all universities is organized around academic departments, and student still get degrees in specialized disciplines. The digital revolution was supposed to sweep away all these structures and replace them with fluid, self-paced, participatory learning. In fact, those who predicted such changes were really imagining what seemed to be the natural outcome of the breakdown of knowledge hierarchies, which the traditional university embodied. On the other hand, digital media and applications have significantly changed and expanded the ways in which materials are presented and the still traditional courses are taught and graded. Most courses have online syllabuses and assignments are often turned in electronically. Many courses has dispensed with physical books or textbooks altogether.
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) illustrate both the changes and the continuities of the university as an institution. Whether it is a marketing strategy or a new form of education, or both, the MOOC is not meant to replace the physical university, but extend it into the digital plenitude. Two of the major purveyors of MOOCs in the United States (Coursera and edX) are consortia of universities, and they promote the value of their courses on the basis of the brand of their participating universities. edX was founded by Harvard and MIT and includes other top institutions such as Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. Coursera is larger and more diverse, but its universities are still prestigious. edX’s web page promises “the best courses” from the “best professors” at the “best schools” (edX 2013). What these MOOCs offer to students all over the world is the opportunity to attend virtually a class that they are unlikely ever to be able to attend in person: you can take a class at Harvard, along with 29,000 other students. MOOCs would not be possible without the changes that were already happening in the university: the growing use of the Internet and online course materials in conventional classes.
MOOCs, however, do renegotiate the relationship between various forms of media in higher education. David Finegold of Rutgers Unviersity has said that the “MOOC is the new textbook” (Young 2013), but in fact at least the first generation of MOOCs often require students to read printed textbooks. A course consists of video lectures supported by textbooks and other printed or online readings. The video presents the professor in her role as lecturer, while the readings perform the same function as they do in a traditional course. Forms of social media may be used to replace classroom interactions among students or between students and the professor. Ironically, after decades of hostility from educators, television, at least video, finally acquires a prominent role as an educational tool. (Some MOOCs use other models, such as small segmented topics with illustrative videos rather than traditional lectures.) A key feature for all MOOCs is scale: the same course can be taken by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of students. It is education for and in the digital plenitude.
That massification opens the idea of MOOC to the obvious criticism that the value of a university education lies precisely in the community of the classroom, library, and even the dorm. And even if wildly successful, the MOOC will never replace all the other kinds of American higher education. It will join the for-profit online services, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, commuter campuses, technical institutes, and research universities in the heterogeneous mix of institutions that supply the voracious American market. (In Europe the mix is less heterogeneous but is becoming more so. For-profit private universities are appearing.) MOOCs exemplify and may perhaps accelerate the changing media mix of the university, in which, the status of the printed book is being renegotiated and frankly diminished.
The diminished role of the book and the collapse of hierarchies threaten humanities departments in universities far more than the sciences and other technical disciplines. Scientific fields are no longer committed to the book for research. And although textbooks remain important in these fields, their teaching materials can and probably will eventually move online. At the same time, the general cultural status of technical fields has not been undermined to the same degree as the humanities. Although there is more questioning of scientific expertise in areas of social policy, advanced societies still accept that scientists and technicians have an area of competence and a way of knowing that are indispensable. Science studies (a humanistic discipline) has done nothing to undermine that general belief. The modern American research university emerged after the Second World War, when the government began to fund scientific research on a large scale, often for military purposes but also for the physical and health sciences, and that funding continues, even if it is diminishing. The humanities never benefited from funding on that scale. As the cultural hierarchies of the art and literature were called into question, the relatively poor humanities in the university have necessarily suffered from loss of status, even if they can rely on the fragmentary survival of the rhetoric of the value of the history, literature, and art.
An indication of the condition of the humanities is provided by “The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation,” a report from the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences to the Academy of Arts and Science (2013). (The lengthy titles already indicates the elite pedigree of the report.) The Commission contends that the humanities in the universities are underfunded and losing students. This is not a new claim: the debate over the plight of the humanities has been ongoing among humanities (Spacks and Berlowitz 2009). As the title “The Heart of the Matter” makes clear, the report’s controlling assumption is that there remains a body of knowledge that everyone should know, a center to our culture. Commissioned by Congress and intended for political consumption, the report adopts a pragmatic tone: “We must recognize that all disciplines (humanities and social sciences) are essential to for the inventiveness, competitiveness, security, and personal fulfillment of the American public” (p 11).The report’s praise for the study of history and the practice of the arts has a strong salvational character. We are saved as individual and as a society by a knowledge of history, the study of other cultures, other languages, and so on. As citizens, we need the humanities to “participate meaningfully in the democratic process”; as individuals, we need the humanities to “understand ourselves.” If we think back to Matthew Arnold’s defense of art at the end of the nineteenth century, we see a long tradition of the notion of salvation through art and learning coming to a utilitarian end in the argument that the humanities are needed to guarantee America’s global competitiveness.
But what exactly are the humanities today, and what do they study? The report tries to be elite and inclusive at the same time, as the membership of the Commission itself indicates: it includes an elite artist, the cellist YoYo Ma, but also famous and influential figures in popular culture such George Lucas, Ken Burns, and John Lithgow. Representatives of film and television are called on to rescue the traditional humanities by insisting on their centrality for a culture that includes such popular arts. Yet the predicament of the humanities is really only one for those in the community who still insist on the universal character of certain forms of art, certain kinds of historical and cultural study. The report of the commission got some attention when published; its platitudes were endorsed by David Brooks of the New York Times (himself a member of the commission) and others. In fact, no one is really arguing on the other side, against the value of the humanities, because our media culture finds nothing to oppose. As Stanley Fish points out in his critical blog piece on the report, no one is against “understanding” or “meaningfulness” (June 2013). When American conservatives often complain about “tenured radicals” in the universities, they mean the humanists. But they are generally complaining about the approaches (post-structuralism, feminism, cultural studies) that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, not the study of elite literature or history per se. Although the community of humanities scholars may be diminishing in numbers, job security, and status accordingly, it can continue as one of many cultural interest groups, and it will in fact benefit from the institutional inertia of the university to maintain somewhat larger size and funding then its status might justify.
The report addresses the question of media in passing, recommending support for digital online resources and open access journals. The Commission is not hostile to digital media used in support of traditional scholarship (p. 52) and suggests that through digital technology “we are on the eve of a new age of teaching and learning, the dimensions of which we can only begin to envision” (p. 35). The report makes no attempt, however, to explain how the humanities have been defined historically by the association with the book and particularly the printed book.
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) illustrate both the changes and the continuities of the university as an institution. Whether it is a marketing strategy or a new form of education, or both, the MOOC is not meant to replace the physical university, but extend it into the digital plenitude. Two of the major purveyors of MOOCs in the United States (Coursera and edX) are consortia of universities, and they promote the value of their courses on the basis of the brand of their participating universities. edX was founded by Harvard and MIT and includes other top institutions such as Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. Coursera is larger and more diverse, but its universities are still prestigious. edX’s web page promises “the best courses” from the “best professors” at the “best schools” (edX 2013). What these MOOCs offer to students all over the world is the opportunity to attend virtually a class that they are unlikely ever to be able to attend in person: you can take a class at Harvard, along with 29,000 other students. MOOCs would not be possible without the changes that were already happening in the university: the growing use of the Internet and online course materials in conventional classes.
MOOCs, however, do renegotiate the relationship between various forms of media in higher education. David Finegold of Rutgers Unviersity has said that the “MOOC is the new textbook” (Young 2013), but in fact at least the first generation of MOOCs often require students to read printed textbooks. A course consists of video lectures supported by textbooks and other printed or online readings. The video presents the professor in her role as lecturer, while the readings perform the same function as they do in a traditional course. Forms of social media may be used to replace classroom interactions among students or between students and the professor. Ironically, after decades of hostility from educators, television, at least video, finally acquires a prominent role as an educational tool. (Some MOOCs use other models, such as small segmented topics with illustrative videos rather than traditional lectures.) A key feature for all MOOCs is scale: the same course can be taken by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of students. It is education for and in the digital plenitude.
That massification opens the idea of MOOC to the obvious criticism that the value of a university education lies precisely in the community of the classroom, library, and even the dorm. And even if wildly successful, the MOOC will never replace all the other kinds of American higher education. It will join the for-profit online services, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, commuter campuses, technical institutes, and research universities in the heterogeneous mix of institutions that supply the voracious American market. (In Europe the mix is less heterogeneous but is becoming more so. For-profit private universities are appearing.) MOOCs exemplify and may perhaps accelerate the changing media mix of the university, in which, the status of the printed book is being renegotiated and frankly diminished.
The diminished role of the book and the collapse of hierarchies threaten humanities departments in universities far more than the sciences and other technical disciplines. Scientific fields are no longer committed to the book for research. And although textbooks remain important in these fields, their teaching materials can and probably will eventually move online. At the same time, the general cultural status of technical fields has not been undermined to the same degree as the humanities. Although there is more questioning of scientific expertise in areas of social policy, advanced societies still accept that scientists and technicians have an area of competence and a way of knowing that are indispensable. Science studies (a humanistic discipline) has done nothing to undermine that general belief. The modern American research university emerged after the Second World War, when the government began to fund scientific research on a large scale, often for military purposes but also for the physical and health sciences, and that funding continues, even if it is diminishing. The humanities never benefited from funding on that scale. As the cultural hierarchies of the art and literature were called into question, the relatively poor humanities in the university have necessarily suffered from loss of status, even if they can rely on the fragmentary survival of the rhetoric of the value of the history, literature, and art.
An indication of the condition of the humanities is provided by “The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation,” a report from the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences to the Academy of Arts and Science (2013). (The lengthy titles already indicates the elite pedigree of the report.) The Commission contends that the humanities in the universities are underfunded and losing students. This is not a new claim: the debate over the plight of the humanities has been ongoing among humanities (Spacks and Berlowitz 2009). As the title “The Heart of the Matter” makes clear, the report’s controlling assumption is that there remains a body of knowledge that everyone should know, a center to our culture. Commissioned by Congress and intended for political consumption, the report adopts a pragmatic tone: “We must recognize that all disciplines (humanities and social sciences) are essential to for the inventiveness, competitiveness, security, and personal fulfillment of the American public” (p 11).The report’s praise for the study of history and the practice of the arts has a strong salvational character. We are saved as individual and as a society by a knowledge of history, the study of other cultures, other languages, and so on. As citizens, we need the humanities to “participate meaningfully in the democratic process”; as individuals, we need the humanities to “understand ourselves.” If we think back to Matthew Arnold’s defense of art at the end of the nineteenth century, we see a long tradition of the notion of salvation through art and learning coming to a utilitarian end in the argument that the humanities are needed to guarantee America’s global competitiveness.
But what exactly are the humanities today, and what do they study? The report tries to be elite and inclusive at the same time, as the membership of the Commission itself indicates: it includes an elite artist, the cellist YoYo Ma, but also famous and influential figures in popular culture such George Lucas, Ken Burns, and John Lithgow. Representatives of film and television are called on to rescue the traditional humanities by insisting on their centrality for a culture that includes such popular arts. Yet the predicament of the humanities is really only one for those in the community who still insist on the universal character of certain forms of art, certain kinds of historical and cultural study. The report of the commission got some attention when published; its platitudes were endorsed by David Brooks of the New York Times (himself a member of the commission) and others. In fact, no one is really arguing on the other side, against the value of the humanities, because our media culture finds nothing to oppose. As Stanley Fish points out in his critical blog piece on the report, no one is against “understanding” or “meaningfulness” (June 2013). When American conservatives often complain about “tenured radicals” in the universities, they mean the humanists. But they are generally complaining about the approaches (post-structuralism, feminism, cultural studies) that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, not the study of elite literature or history per se. Although the community of humanities scholars may be diminishing in numbers, job security, and status accordingly, it can continue as one of many cultural interest groups, and it will in fact benefit from the institutional inertia of the university to maintain somewhat larger size and funding then its status might justify.
The report addresses the question of media in passing, recommending support for digital online resources and open access journals. The Commission is not hostile to digital media used in support of traditional scholarship (p. 52) and suggests that through digital technology “we are on the eve of a new age of teaching and learning, the dimensions of which we can only begin to envision” (p. 35). The report makes no attempt, however, to explain how the humanities have been defined historically by the association with the book and particularly the printed book.
Reading communities, new and old
Even today the printed book remains a symbol powerful enough to constitute the literary world as a coherent community. To defend the printed book, that community seems increasingly willing to isolate itself. Its emphasis on the salvational power of close reading and coherent argumentation cannot help but suggest a distinction between serious and superficial. And for all the ways in which the literary community and the humanities have opened up to new kinds of writing and new groups of authors, the dichotomy between elite and popular remains, rising easily to the surface in judgements about which authors are worth reading and which are not. In this, the literary world is like the contemporary art world, as we have seen. Although we live in a culture in which anyone can make art with almost any materials and almost any educational background, the art world insists that there remains an inside and outside: that certain works are serious art and the rest are not (Van Laar and Diepeveen 2013). The same is true with the literary world, where the desire is as strong as ever to draw a boundary between the literary and the rest of the world of digitized and digital writing.
That the literary world remains vitally concerned with its own cultural centrality today is a legacy of modernism, for which the notion of a culture without a center was incomprehensible. For much of the twentieth century, the goal of each artistic movement, each critical school, each -ism was to claim its in place in the center, and not incidentally to displace the others. Heir to the modernist century, today’s literary community is ill-prepared to accept a plenitude of writing, in which the book becomes the ebook, the encyclopedia becomes wikipedia, and the library becomes a network of websites and databases—a network of multiple and redundant link sets among repositories of textual and imagistic data.
At the same time, printed books and other materials do remain the preferred form for an important class of readers. Printed encyclopedias may be disappearing, but physical libraries remain important as institutions, even as they adapt to new classes of patrons and becoming hybrids of physical materials and digital database. These classes of patrons read different kinds of texts, and they read them differently. The casual collective reading that happens on the Web, the movement among pages and among media from text to image to audio track and back—in short, polyaesthetic reading and its active partner, remix, are practices of an enormously large community, which its own standards of knowledge.
That the literary world remains vitally concerned with its own cultural centrality today is a legacy of modernism, for which the notion of a culture without a center was incomprehensible. For much of the twentieth century, the goal of each artistic movement, each critical school, each -ism was to claim its in place in the center, and not incidentally to displace the others. Heir to the modernist century, today’s literary community is ill-prepared to accept a plenitude of writing, in which the book becomes the ebook, the encyclopedia becomes wikipedia, and the library becomes a network of websites and databases—a network of multiple and redundant link sets among repositories of textual and imagistic data.
At the same time, printed books and other materials do remain the preferred form for an important class of readers. Printed encyclopedias may be disappearing, but physical libraries remain important as institutions, even as they adapt to new classes of patrons and becoming hybrids of physical materials and digital database. These classes of patrons read different kinds of texts, and they read them differently. The casual collective reading that happens on the Web, the movement among pages and among media from text to image to audio track and back—in short, polyaesthetic reading and its active partner, remix, are practices of an enormously large community, which its own standards of knowledge.