Go go Gadget book!

To the right, though it's too small to be viewed here, is the image that greeted me when I logged into Amazon.com today (click the pic for a full-size, readable image). It's a message from Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, the purpose of which is to plug their latest gadget: Kindle, "a wireless portable reading device with instant access to more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers."

People have for the most part been rejecting electronic books and reading devices for years, and Bezos seems to know why. While Kindle would pay for itself after about approximately twenty books (figuring an average price of $20 per tome), most people I know would gladly continue to fork over the green (or its virtual equivalent) for the "real" thing--the real thing giving us some undefinable tactile experience that for all I know flips some sort of nostalgia switch in our brains or helps us to disconnect from a world all too cluttered with all too many things that beep or squawk at you when they need recharging. I for one like to nibble absentmindedly on the corners of my books, dog-ear their pages, and utterly ruin them for others with tea-stains, chocolate smudges, and obnoxious marginalia. If I should happen to want to throw the book at something, I am also reassured by the knowledge that it is the target rather than the book that will sustain the most damage in the transfer of energy. Can't go throwing $400 doohickeys about unless you're a celebrity or producer of some sort.

Bezos et al. have been working for three years on this latest attempt to lure us literary luddites away from the pleasures of pulp. He acknowledges the elegance of the physical book in an opening salvo that would have your average materialist pulling out his or her very real hair:

"The physical book is so elegant that the artifact itself disappears into the background. The paper, glue, ink and stitching that make up the book vanish, and what remains is the author's world."

I tend to sneer a bit more than I should at book historians who insist I need to sniff at two centuries' worth of dust and foxing in order to understanding a text, so for the most part I'm prepared to agree that once the act of reading has gotten underway I tend not to consider the binding. I don't think the artifact quite disappears, however, and in his heart of hearts I don't think Bezos does either. What he seems to suggest is the crucial element of the new gizmo is its realistic recreation of the appearance of paper. Not forgetting that reading is a visual business, and well aware that reading Clarissa on a screen would have us looking for even faster means of suicide than hanging, the authors of the Kindle product page write: "Revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper."

Looks and reads. I'm not quite sure how to parse that bit of ad-copy--can't quite figure out how you'd get something that looked like real paper but didn't "read" like it--but that's as may be. A Marshall McLuhan fan would definitely like the idea of throwing three years of development into recreating paper: the old technology definitely becomes the content of the new in this scenario. It would seem that in this case the decision is really driven by aesthetics in the pre-nineteenth-century sense of the term. There's something about our sensory interaction with ink and paper that can't be topped by any other graphic representation (perhaps if they can figure out how to "upload" content Matrix-style we'll give up the graphic).

As always, I'm thinking about archives, and it's interesting to me how technodetermined the archive is with a doodad like this one. I don't know how many "classics" of literature will be available; at the moment it seems that you can get any number of magazines and blogs, and almost anything from the NY Times bestseller list. So if you decide that Kindle is how you're going to consume literature, you're really letting the technology determine what you're going to have access to. It's like the "problem" with JSTOR I heard described at a recent job talk--users get the sense that if it's not available electronically, it's not worth reading or simply doesn't exist.

I don't think Kindle is going to have that kind of impact, of course--I'm just theorizing about what it represents in an abstract sense. I'm fairly certain that it's going to be literature's answer to the Segway. Toni Morrison and James Patterson are already shilling for it, if that means anything to you.

There's also something to be said about its offering the availability of a bazillion blogs, magazines, and newspapers as major selling points when no one has ever read blogs on anything but a screen, and when newspaper circulation keeps going down every quarter.

Would you buy one?

INXS

First of all, many thanks to Alice for the free press. Her recent entry is the first (and possibly last) demonstration of the relevance of what I'm working on to someone who is neither me nor has been dead for more than two centuries. Generally speaking I prefer a late audience, as I, like so many others, am in the habit of taking by one's silence that he or she agrees; but, as the living go, she is absolutely aces.

Secondly, why have I titled this entry after an Australian rock band that will this very summer be celebrating its twentieth anniversary? For a number of reasons:

1. I am following Alice's use of the word "excess" in her title
2. The band has shown durability beyond both my hopes and expectations and done so in the cyclical fashion enjoyed by many the canonical text
3. The name of said band gets at one of my hobbyhorses--it eliminates "excess" information: that is, a space between words, two "e's", a "c", and an "s".
   
4. I am hopelessly ridiculous.

In reading Alice's post and learning of Gordon Bell's digitally archiving what anyone but the most dedicated voyeur, narcissist, or future anthropologist would likely discard as the excruciating minutiae of a life that had better turn out to be remarkable for more than having digitally archived what anyone but the most dedicated voyeur, narcissist, or future anthropologist...

I'll start again.

It's interesting that Bell is recording everything in a digital archive, as digital technology is precisely that upon which all the archivists whose works I've read suggest an archivist should not rely. It is not, to deploy what I have recently discovered is not "my" buzzword, durable. If you want a durable medium, you're still far better off with analogs--stone, metal, quality paper, etc. If you have anything that's important to you on a 5 1/4 floppy, you know what I'm talking about. I haven't read the Bell (and I don't mean to disparage his character at all; I agree with Alice that he's up to something terribly interesting), so I'm sure he's aware of this.

It does bring up an interesting part of the technology tradeoff, which until I'm better educated I'm going to think about in spatial and temporal terms. Scanning, photodocumenting, etc. -- anything that eliminates the middlemen of analog conservation processes -- enables closer-to-comprehensive documentation by saving both time and space. Space is the easy part. The problem with analog storage is of course that it takes up so much damn real estate. Bell can only do what he's doing because he doesn't have to buy a small moon on which to keep everything he wishes to preserve. As Gabriel Naudé lamented in the seventeenth century, comprehensive knowledge is impossible with respect to space because comprehensive data storage and therefore retrieval are impossible. Or, as comedian Steven Wright put it, "you can't have everything. Where would you put it?" The selection process of survival and canonicity, a librarian will tell you, or might have formerly told you, is driven as much by space as anything else. One wonders to what extent matters of taste came to prominence precisely because proliferation put space at a premium and demanded more stringent and nigh-on metaphysical standards of valuation. "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed" is nothing if not quantity reduced to quality. The best expression can stand in for (take the space of) the countless iterations of something clogging up everyone's brains and bookshelves. (The entry on "memory," included in the treatise on metaphysics in the first edition Encyclopedia Britannica (1768-1771) and culled -- in another space-saving gesture -- from John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding uses spatial metaphors such as "storehouse" and "repository" to describe the memory. We're hardly out of the habit.) Now, of course, all we have to do is define "best." Plenty of people around willing to do that.

So, the gizmodification of the world buys us space. The library without walls envisioned by frustrated Enlightenment types can finally exist; total storage and total retrieval are theoretically possible; we can put everything everywhere (of course, this doesn't mean that we can just get rid of the analog "originals." Book historians now weep over the countless manuscripts cast aside when their contents were brought out in print, and as this article suggests, space remains a huge problem. Also interesting and having to do with space, storage, and digital technology is this article).

Tech also buys you time, but the relationship of proliferation to time is a bit more complicated. The proliferation of print is indeed all about time--as Polydore Vergil wrote in 1499 (and as Thomas Langley translated half a century or so later): "one man may print more in one day, than many men in many years could write." You're going to run out of space one way or another, but with high rates of production and increased distribution you're going to run out of more space faster. So in that respect time is the primary concern, but the advantage of speed was one of the most highly praised with respect to the printing press. I'm guessing that it's similarly the temporal advantage of technology even more than the storage concern that makes Bell's project feasible. You certainly can't write to the moment, as Tristram Shandy laments (Fielding's take on this in Shamela is, by the way, one of my favorite things in literature), but with the right gadgets you could perhaps nearly digitize to the moment -- one man may scan more in a day, etc. This I think is the point of Twitter. Limiting the time it takes to make a record (twitter restricts you to 140 characters per message) makes it possible to make more records. As one friend tells me, you send these little missives "all day long." Assuming you can find the right medium between doing things and recording things done, you've got a much more detailed picture of a life to be viewed by you and your posterity at some point down the line.

Or do you? Do 100 140-character notes add up to one 1400-word document? If we don't know what you thought of that bottle of Romanee Conti the label of which you've scanned, or that you barely had space enough to tell us you drank, we might think the more important part of your history has been left out. How do we define ephemera? Dictionaries define it as referring to written or printed documents intended to have a brief lifetime (remarkable how long the concept of "life" has been wrapped up in that of writing. Writing doesn't just exist, or remain--it lives). Ephemera is something you read, and immediately discard. So are my friends' 140-character messages ephemera? What happens to them if I keep them, collect them, string them together, reconstitute them as some sort of narrative? Are they still ephemera? In choosing to record a life 140 characters at a time rather than burden yourself or your friends with "long" entries, could you end up producing an ephemeral 140,000 word document?

What's happened here is an important switch in perspective. So far I've been mostly writing about production. The other side of that coin is of course consumption, and it's on this side that the temporal and spatial advantages of technology meet the limitations of being human. Technology may have allowed you to record twenty years of minutiae and given you a convenient way of carrying it about, but it hasn't given me twenty extra years in which to review it. And if Monsieur Naudé had managed to secure, oh, let's say the entire Left Bank for his Master Library I'm not entirely sure how much time he'd have left to poke about in it. I've written about this problem before -- you can't read everything, and depending on why you're reading, it's possible that you oughtn't to read too much in the first place. Technology doesn't buy the consumer more time; rather, in the context of an increasing and increasingly available body of knowledge contained in print, it makes the same amount of time "worth" less. It's all perfectly well and good if a couple of friends want to send me or make otherwise available ten, twenty, thirty messages a day. I'll be very up-to-date. But if five friends do the same, one wonders if it will start being more trouble than it's worth. And if ten friends do the same, that gives me up to 300 X 140 characters, or 42,000 characters, to read per day. That's just under 30 double-spaced pages of notes. Thank God I'm antisocial. Even so, I can imagine that with much material, I would find myself making decisions about my friends that I would otherwise not have made. "Terribly sorry, old man, but I simply haven't time for any more friends than I can read on the subway. I'm afraid you shall either have to start doing more interesting things with your life, edit yourself down to a reasonable amount, or shove off."

I'm fairly certain that these were roughly the same options readers and/or booksellers gave authors in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Welcome my friends to the show that never ends.

So--on the production side, tech buys time and space. On the consumption side, it makes the process of selection ever more narrowing, and time matters more when space matters less. The only way to combat the time problem caused by proliferation in the absence of spacial inhibitors is a new line in research--a method of knowledge production that reduces time spent in consuming. Though this of course presumes that you're interesting in knowing everything. Or aspiring to knowing everything. Or deluding yourself into thinking you can aspire to know everything. But then, that's what Enlightenment is all about -- with one important distinction. Enlightenment was always about the future. All the mysteries would not be solved in a single lifetime. It would take an untold number to map the mind of the God through the close examination of his works. That meant handing things down, passing them along, securing some sort of continuity that would enable posterity to both understand and carry on the work.

This is why the encyclopedists -- Chambers, at least -- imagined the Cyclopaedia as that work with which humanity could start over if all other works were destroyed. Not start over in a complete sense, of course, but start over from where it left off: in the midst of Enlightenment. So, if you had to save one thing from a world on fire...

Hm. Speaking of proliferation and reduction, this entry has had too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Anything to avoid real work.

Fractal Geometry and the Progress of Enlightenment

I was talking with a colleague today about the digitization of the archive. This is a fairly hot topic right now, and it's in the subtext of my still flailing dissertation proposal, but I thought I'd take a few minutes to express my thoughts on the subject.

As I have previously articulated, the progress of Enlightenment in the 18th century depended on a process of systematic reduction of an archive still in the making. Too much knowledge becomes as much an obstacle to Enlightenment as too little; as that which is discovered and set down proliferates, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend into Enlightenment's supposed epistemological endpoint: a System of the World. You just can't account for everything. The system, I'm suggesting, answered this problem with the emergence and proliferation of reducing mechanisms and an organizational hierarchy: the encyclopedia, the anthology, the novel, literary criticism. These became principal (but not exclusive) tools of temporal hiearchization; they separated that which was worth keeping from that which was not, and transmitted it to the present and future. Of course, it wasn't "pure" in the sense of a closed system. Cultural values determined standards of originality and "taste"; copyright law and taxes met with the marketplace and caused tremors. There was plenty that got in wrapped up into the system apart from the mere proliferation of texts.

Nevertheless, the technology made it so that some rubric of temporal hierarchization had to be in place. You couldn't keep all the books in one place; you couldn't figure out everything that was there to be kept; things rotted and fell apart. Choices had to be made; knowledge had to be reduced and contained whether materially or conceptually. Whether it goes to a "good" place or not, any "progress" would seem to depend on leaving some things behind.

The counterargument, of course, must involve the fact that societies change; values change; and what was left behind before might be more useful now. The eighteenth century, for example, wasn't trying to understand itself in the way that scholars try to understand it. We have (or think we have) a different purpose. So we attempt to recover the forgotten, the lost, the texts tossed onto -- to borrow a phrase from Harold Weber -- the garbage heap of memory. And a lot of good stuff has come from doing this. REALLY good, seriously important stuff.

So what's the problem with the digital archive, presuming that eventually, everything will actually be made available and set on equal terms? It can feel like the undoing of Enlightenment, the total victory of some sort of moral or intellectual relativism, the final fracturing of epistemology into as many shards as there are ones and zeroes. We put all that stuff aside in order to get somewhere--why dig it all back up again? I've said it before and I'll say it again--to believe in everything is to believe in nothing. How can you form a theory when you have to account for everything, which, as I've said, is impossible? Does anything actually change, with respect to scholarship, with a completely restored archive? Do we do the same work with the awareness that we're leaving more out? Or will our research actually start to take SO much time, and attempt such extravagant levels of comprehensiveness, that producing anything takes forever? And wouldn't THAT be the end of Enlightenment? Edward Young (and later Emerson, who was certainly no Enlightenment figure, but the substance of what he said is the same) was saying in the mid-eighteenth that people would be better off doing a bit less reading and a bit more writing. But these concerns are already well-trod ground.

Inifinity is the death of meaning. You need an endpoint to give anything you do purpose. It's only the fact that life ends that makes life special. So in that respect, the digital archive is a bad thing. We'll never be able to make sense of it all. Something will contradict everything. It won't cohere, everything will be refutable, and we'll all have to embrace nihilism. And that's just depressing. It might be the reality of things. But why should we be flummoxed by realities? History might not be teleological (religious doctrines aside), but wouldn't it be nice if we kept on thinking we could make it go someplace good anyway? If we treat it that way, might it not happen? Is that more important?

The only hope with respect to the digitization of the archive and the negative effects it could have on scholarship is the possibility that Enlightenment isn't over. That complete availability might return us to a purer Baconian enterprise. The eighteenth century attempted to systematize prematurely. Bacon warned us about that. Then Romanticism came along and splintered everything up into individuality and specialization. The disciplines burrowed narrow and deep for a couple hundred years. We exhausted the potential of what was available. And we have seen -- with interdisciplinarity, with dedesciplinarity -- the beginning of a return to systematizing. But perhaps we the moment has still not come.

I submit that we are trapped in a fractal. That knowledge, as a system, works the same way. The micro level looks just like the macro; the pattern repeats. Enlightenment built its systems out of print. We used what they built to build more systems. Our systems will be the foundation of larger systems. And we will discover that what we thought was a system--or a discipline, a theoretical approach, whatever--was actually just a tiny piece of a much, much larger system that operates the same way but contains everything built over generations of scholarship. I use the encyclopedia to demonstrate this. Every individual edition of an encyclopedia looks like the as of yet unwritten "master" encyclopedia, that will contain all the knowledge of its predecessors. It will be complete, just as each edition was "complete" in the time it was made. What if the entire system works this way? We're all just writing an unbound encyclopedia. What we do will be contained by the next one.

I'm not speaking metaphorically, here. I think the system of knowledge might actually work this way. We treat the Enlightenment like it's over. But the greatest trick the devil ever pulled...this is how the system organizes itself. We're part of that system.

Perhaps our not thinking we still serve its purposes is precisely what enables us to do so? We lose faith in the system--and in doing so we eventually engender precisely those conditions that Bacon predicted would enable the system to emerge?

Well? Anyone want to drink my Kool-Aid? If it all comes true remember you heard it here first. COPYRIGHT.