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Book and Screen: My major professor in
graduate school would often speak of the beauty of philosophy as a discipline.
For him, philosophy had a rare quality in the academy; for unlike history
with its ledgers and archives, or chemistry with its laboratories, one needed
only one’s mind, and perhaps a pencil and a piece of paper, to do philosophy.
I think back on that comment with some amusement at times, and a sense of
loss at others. Most mornings I power
up my office computer first thing, to check on my e-mail. Colleagues who are
even earlier risers than I may have left me an important message, and mail
sent throughout the night may need similar tending. I infrequently consult
the Web however, usually just bookmarking sites that I do not have the time
to investigate. This large overflowing and exponentially growing digital
magazine stall of sorts often overwhelms me with its vast quantities of
information and links to other links. Over on my shelf, professional journals
often pile up, unread for weeks, while others I glance at quickly before
recycling or circulating. Overflowing information and tasks often crowd what
precious time I have available for philosophical reflection. The acceleration and
compression of time in present day life is not a new topic. That native
cultures cling closely to seasonal time is a stock bit of knowledge in
cultural anthropology. Though concerns about the compression of time
certainly predate the modern industrial age, it was with massive and
wholesale industrialization that time became a commodity as such we
recognize today. From Henry Thoreau to Wendell Berry, prophets close to the
land sound a clarion call about losing the slower paced time of natural
occurrences. The seasonal time of family agriculture has almost entirely
given way to the clock time of industry and commerce. Many of us now think
that the pace of life is still accelerating, and there is evidence that this
thought is not unwarranted. (A number of writers and thinkers have noted the
irony of many supposed timesaving devices that do not save time but fill it.
I believe computers may be a good example of this irony. I am reminded of
this whimsical definition: Computer: Hour and hour of complexity for a moment
of simplicity.) Most of us probably
remember the concept of the “paperless office” promised by the advent of
widespread computerization. The part of the promise that caught attention
dealt with relieving one from the onerous burden of filing paper, sorting
paper, and so forth. Work would be that much easier, and heretofore filled
time would be freed for nobler, or at least more satisfying, pursuits. However, one of the
ironies of the widespread use of computers for “knowledge workers” like many
of us is that we now have even less time for more leisurely, reflective
activities like reading books, writing essays, or talking to colleagues,
friends, or family. We subscribe to e-mail lists and attempt to keep ahead of
website growth. A great deal of such activity tends to be not reflective or
measured, but rather hurried and superficial. Many of us feel the pressure of
a so-called “digital” culture as it affects other customs and habits, such as
reading books in a reflective, leisurely manner. We are here in such a
reflective moment, books—and coffee. For me this brings back vivid memories
of my undergraduate days, where tea was served at 4 in the English library,
and overstuffed chairs invited time for reading, reflection, and discussion.
We seem to be losing such moments, and are balanced on the edge between a
more leisurely reading-of-books culture and the world of quick information
access and retrieval. One could argue that
there has always been a great deal of information present, at least in
printed form since Gutenberg. The penny press and popular periodicals clogged
nineteenth-century markets. Newspapers, though praised by Hegel, were
criticized by Thoreau and others as no more than distractions, and certainly
not necessary for the good life. The advent of the popular media, notably
broadcast television, brought reading and reflection under greater stress.
The further development of widespread access to information presented through
personal computers is really what has exacerbated fully the tension between
book and screen, print and digital culture. To get to this
tension in a productive way, I have turned to an enthusiastic proponent of
these new technologies. Nicholas Negroponte’s being digital has value as a guide in this time of transition.
Negroponte eagerly touts new and emerging developments in information
technology, and focuses in sharp relief this change for those of us who have
taken the time for coffee, and books, on this winter’s afternoon. Nicholas Negroponte
is the founding director of the Media Lab at MIT. He is celebrated in the
popular press and writes a widely read column in Wired magazine, the self-proclaimed organ of the new digital
culture. Trained as an architect, he and a group of creative, renegade
colleagues started the Media Lab, a research and development center for the
new computer technologies, before terms like “multimedia” were common
coinage. He compares his colleagues to the famous Salon des Refusés, the
French impressionists who were not admitted to the official art world in
Paris in the mid nineteenth century: We came together in
the early 1980s as a counterculture to the establishment of computer science,
which at the time was still preoccupied with programming languages, operating
systems, network protocols, and system architectures. The common bond was not
a discipline, but a belief that computers would dramatically alter and affect
the quality of life through their ubiquity, not just in science, but in every
aspect of living. (225) Though Negroponte now
counts himself as part of the establishment, and the young Gen X Internet
surfers as the “crazy kids on the block,” he is optimistic and enthused about
the future of computing and its role in society. This enthusiasm, which
bubbles over in inventive hypotheses throughout the book, partly accounts for
the book’s mass appeal and acceptance. Negroponte writes breezily and well,
with a bit of sass and spunk. He counts as his most satisfying achievement
that his 79 year-old mother now e-mails him daily. The first sentence of
being digital is a definite
challenge to the sensibility of a booklover: “Being dyslexic I don’t like to
read” (1). This is the vision of a man of the screen and circuit, rather than
the page and margin. Yet Negroponte writes a book, in spite of the fact that
even the dustjacket proclaims that the words contained within the volume are
already obsolete, an irony I shall return to later. Key to understanding
Negroponte’s book and his vision are the metaphysical categories of bits,
atoms, and being digital that he introduces. Atoms compose solids, and must
be physically moved; a bottle of mineral water from France must be shipped, a
book must be carried from library to office, and so forth. We are all
familiar with the difficulty of moving physical objects, including ourselves,
and how intractable nature, and Indiana winters, really are. Bits, however,
are the elemental particles of digital technology. Bits encode information,
and can be sent, delivered and transformed much more easily than atoms. To
be digital means to be aware of how our perspectives are transformed when we
look at information and knowledge as a bit rather than an atomic phenomenon. Negroponte approaches
what being digital means by looking at how information technologies will
continue to transform various parts of our lives. Being digital involves
“instantaneous and inexpensive transfer” of information, rather than the
slower and more costly method of moving atoms. He discusses with great
enthusiasm various aspects of the new digital world, where computing is
ubiquitous, even forming part of the clothes one wears. In a delightful,
rambunctious section typical of much of the book, called “Wearable Media,”
Negroponte proclaims that “[c]omputing corduroy, memory muslin, and solar
silk might be the literal fabric of tomorrow’s digital dress” (209), we might
have digital antennas within our ears, and “in the further future, computer
displays may be sold by the gallon and painted on, CD-ROMs may be edible, and
parallel processors may be applied like suntan lotion. Alternatively, we
might be living in our computers” (211). Being digital concerns how to get
over previous boundaries, whether they be time zones, geography, or hardened,
accepted conceptual categories. The change from the
printed text on paper to that of characters on a glowing screen occupies a
good deal of Negroponte’s attention. This is largely due to the current
state of digital technology; the transformation of the atom to the bit has
occurred here most readily. The evolution of information processing continues
to be quite dramatic. For instance, Negroponte talks about how being digital
means that the depth and breadth issue of normal texts disappears. An
encyclopedia gives breadth but little depth, while a monograph on a
particular narrow topic gives depth but little breadth. As Negroponte points
out, in regard to texts, “In the world of atoms, physical limits preclude
having both breadth and depth in the same volume-unless it’s a book that’s a
mile thick” (69). For Negroponte, the
hypertextual quality permitted by digital technology solves this problem.
References can be expanded upon without using more atoms and taking up
physical space, and the interconnectedness of information is made manifest
and is easily searchable. So being digital means that at least theoretically
one has ready access to all information. However, one can
raise some questions here about the capacity of humans to absorb any more
than a tiny corner of this canvas. In principle, information has always been
accessible. It can best be appropriated by humans if it is woven into a set
of purposes, usually through narrative. The data stream easily washes over
me if I so allow it. Surfing the Internet, or grazing television channels,
does not tend to make a deep impression. What gives shape to this stream is
something that I choose to do with it, to relate it to my own purposes and
values, in short to make it part of my own narrative. In his book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading
in an Electronic Age, Sven Birkerts, a critic of the new technologies,
repeatedly claims that there is a difference between a deep reading and
personal appropriation of an author’s vision, and a more mediated,
interactive, “hypertextual” reading that often characterizes what we do on
the screen. It is in the constitution of the self, as an entity outside the
flow of time, or at least the agent of its own choosing of the sense of time.
Reading is at first glance a mediated experience (the self encounters the
text). However, for Birkerts, an engrossed reading, where the self encounters
itself in deep Bergsonian time, is not a mediated experience, but a radically immediate
one. This type of interior
relation within the self, using a single author book as the occasion for
self-reflection, can be at odds with the gathering or “retrieval” of
information more typical in a digital environment. Thus it is not surprising
that Birkerts is highly critical of the digital experience of reading words
on a screen. He argues against those who would contend that word and text are
the same, whether on screen or page: “Screen and book may exhibit the same
string of words, but the assumptions that underlie their significance are
entirely different depending on whether we are staring at a book or a circuit
generated text” (128). Only a small part of
information available can be relevant to any one person, and here Negroponte
has a digital answer. He poses the concept of narrowcasting, where the vast ocean of information is tailored
to a particular person, by means of advanced search engines that know you as
intimately as your secretary or spouse. Anyone who has
attempted to get information on the Internet via the many current search
engines knows why Negroponte sees this as an improvement. Requests for
information on Yahoo! or Alta Vista will often turn up many irrelevant web
links. Negroponte says that we will see the development of “digital butlers”
and “personal filters” that are completely attuned to one’s personal
preferences. He gives the example of a completely personal newspaper, where
information is culled from far and wide: Imagine a future in
which your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper and catch
every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalized
summary. This kind of newspaper is printed in an edition of one. . . . Call
it The Daily Me. (153) Toward the end of his
book, Negroponte speaks of four forces as preeminent in the shift to a
digital world. Such a world will be a radically decentered world, where authority will not be accumulated but
rather is spread more widely, as easily as access to information permits.
This revolution will have a globalizing
effect, and as political and physical barriers are surmounted, harmonizing among people (and perhaps
even within the academic disciplines) will occur. By putting easily
accessible information in the hands of all, this revolution is empowering. He writes: The information
highway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow.
It will exist beyond people’s wildest predictions. As children appropriate a
global information resource, and as they discover that only adults need
learner’s permits, we are bound to find new hope and dignity in places where
very little existed before . . . (being digital) is almost genetic
in its nature, in that each generation will become more digital than the
preceding one. The control bits of that digital future are more than ever before
in the hands of the young. Nothing could make me happier. (231) However, radical
interconnectedness that does not allow time or place for introspection of
one’s soul, and attention to what an individual person does and can
accomplish, may indeed be disempowering
rather than empowering. Youth may
grow up distracted and unmindful of themselves or the social context in which
they live. In his provocative essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,”
the environmental
writer Wendell Berry calls upon us to tend to our individual duties, to pay
attention to our here and now. He eschews computers because Berry would then
have to rely upon the power companies and other entities beyond his immediate
control. If we are to teach our children anything about the digital age
toward which we are hurtling, it may be the importance of an anchor of local
concern, grounded in individual choice and perspective. Berry works in his
own intensely individual way to conserve the earth, believing that the best
way to do this is to mind one’s own store, in a sense, to “heal thyself”
first. As I survey the
quickly changing developments in information technology, particularly as
these changes impact education, I remind myself that I am a digital
enthusiast who serves as a technology liaison in my school. Yet I am also
steeped in the culture of the book and in the importance of philosophical
reflection with pen, paper, and one’s own mind, as sung in praise by my major
professor. I approach the digital age with a cautious optimism. I would want
our children educated in both worlds, but to not cling to either one with any
finality. And, I believe the
end of the book may be premature. Even the technology enthusiast Negroponte
cannot discount the power of the page, as he envisions the digital
transformation. He wrote a book. When asked why, he said that he wanted to
permit all of us to imagine the new world. This startling admission from a
dyslexic nonreader goes far to deepen the problematic of book and screen in
our cultural life. With a president who
wants every 12 year-old hooked to the Internet, it would be impossible to
remain fixed to the printed page, nor do I think it is desirable. However, it
is vitally important to recognize that critiques of digital technology such
as by Birkerts, Neil Postman, and others arise out of a sensibility that
until recently was a major theme of education. Literature has been one of the
main avenues for fostering personal and moral growth through the development
of a sensibility rooted in individual conscience. I would argue for the
coexistence of these two sensibilities of page and screen, at least from an
educational standpoint. I am mindful of the critiques of Birkerts and others
who assume the finality of a digital victory over the more leisurely, reflective
sensibility. However one cannot ignore the digital transformation occurring
in education and elsewhere. Too often computers
take front and center stage in teaching and learning without sufficient
reflection upon the other avenues available for instruction. Negroponte
speaks of an expressive or intuitive teaching and learning that may open up
with the use of the new technologies. While this is important, I believe that
both book and screen ought to
remain just offstage in an education that focuses on a construction of the
moral self. Let us imagine, then,
this new world, not as merely fully connected and turned on, but rather also
where individuals are mindful of local and personal concern. As the computer
and its networking are important offstage aids, the primacy of the
individual and the tending of one’s soul need to have plenty of room there
too. Even if we are eager to hop aboard the glittering digital train with
Negroponte and his Media Lab, we should not forget the importance of the
feeding, care, and growth of the individual soul, a paramount educational
concern in this age of digital transformation. Purdue University Works Cited Berry, Wendell.
“Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” What
Are People For? San Francisco: North Point P, 1990. 170–77. Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading
in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994. Negroponte,
Nicholas. being digital. 1995. New
York: Vintage, 1996. |
[1]This paper was originally presented as part of the Books and Coffee Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of English, Purdue University.