Birkerts on the Kindle

A recent article by Birkerts about his resistance to Amazon’s kindle and his concerns for the shift from page to screen. Should sound familiar.

Critic and essayist Sven Birkerts comments on what we lose in the page-to-screen transfer

by Sven Birkerts

Resisting the Kindle

The Amazon Kindle—a “new and improved” version of which has just been released—comes on like a technology for our times: crisp, affordable, hugely capacious, capable of connecting to the Internet, and green. How could one argue with any of that? Or with the idea, which I’ve heard voiced over and over, that it will make the reading of texts once again seductive, using the same technology that has drawn people away from the page back to it.

Why, then, am I so uneasy about the page-to-screen transfer—a skeptic if not a downright resister? Perhaps it is because I see in the turning of literal pages—pages bound in literal books—a compelling larger value, and perceive in the move away from the book a move away from a certain kind of cultural understanding, one that I’m not confident that we are replacing, never mind improving upon. I’m not blind to the unwieldiness of the book, or to the cumbersome systems we must maintain to accommodate it—the vast libraries and complicated filing systems. But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly.

The electronic book, on the other hand, represents—and furthers—a circuitry of instant access, which giveth (information) as it taketh away (the great clarifying context, the order). This will not be an instant revolution. Paradigm shifts take time. Right now the Kindle still lives within the context of print. But what would happen if, through growing market share and broad generational adoption, the Kindle were to supplant the bound book? For me the significance of this is not whether people end up reading more or less, or even a matter of what they read. At issue is the deep-structure of the activity. My fear is that as Wikipedia is to information, so will the Kindle become to literature and the humanities: a one-stop outlet, a speedy and irresistibly efficient leveler of context.

Literature—our great archive of human expression—is deeply contextual and historicized. We all know this—we learned it in school. This essential view of literature and the humanities has been—and continues to be—reinforced by our libraries and bookstores, by the obvious physical adjacency of certain texts, the fact of which telegraphs the cumulative time-bound nature of the enterprise.  We get this reflexively.

But reflexes are modified by use and need. As Marshall McLuhan argued decades ago, technology changes reflexes, replacing them with new ones. Our rapidly evolving digital interface is affecting us on many levels, not least those relating to text and information. We read and absorb as the age demands, and our devices set the pace. I was in a crowd at a poetry reading recently, eavesdropping on the conversation behind me. Somebody referenced a poem by Wallace Stevens but couldn’t think of the line. Her neighbor said “Wait—” and proceeded to Blackberry (yes, a verb) the needed words. It took only seconds. Everyone bobbed and nodded—it was the best of all worlds.

My response was less sanguine. I imagined an info-culture of the near future composed entirely of free-floating items of information and expression, all awaiting their access call. I pictured us gradually letting go of Wallace Stevens (and every other artist and producer of work) as the historical flesh-and-blood entity he was, and accepting in his place a Wallace Stevens that is the merely the sum total of his facts—a writer no longer cohering in historical imagination but fragmented into retrievable bits of information. Turning up a quote by tapping a keyboard is not the same as, say, going to Bartlett’s—it short-circuits all contact with the contextual order that books represent. As I see it, the Kindle ethos—offering print by subscription, arriving from a vast, undifferentiated cyber-emporium out there—abets the decimation of context.

I concede, this view is apocalyptic. The Kindle is just a device and the Kindle experience is still mainly about text and reader (and convenience and cost-savings)—I know that. But we should not forget that the sum of reader-text encounters creates our cultural landscape. So if it happens that in a few decades—maybe less—we move wholesale into a world where information and texts are called onto the screen by the touch of a button, and libraries survive as information centers rather than as repositories of printed books, we will not simply have replaced one delivery system with another. We will also have modified our imagination of history, our understanding of the causal and associative relationships of ideas and their creators. We may gain an extraordinary dots-per-square-inch level of access to detail, but in the process we will lose much of our sense of the woven narrative consistency of the story. That is the trade-off. Access versus context. As for Pride and Prejudice—Austen’s words will reach the reader’s eye in the same sequence they always have. What will change is the receiving sensibility, the background understanding of what this text was – how it emerged and took its place in the context of other texts—and how it moved through the culture.

The Kindle is not the Devil’s calling card—it makes all kinds of sense as a technology. And it won’t by itself undo centuries-old ways of doing things, or precipitate anything that isn’t already poised to happen. But we misjudge it if we construe it as just another useful new tool.

Birkerts v. Hayles: book v. mediation

Note on process: This posting represents an alternative approach for using the Glog in response to reading. In my first Glog on Gutenberg Elegies (focusing mainly on the introduction and first chapter), I used the glog while reading, taking notes, then spending more time with an issue I noticed and wanted to delve into. In effect, I finished the Glog when I finished reading. Those of you who like to read and take notes might try this. Remember that you needn’t write the entry live; you can if you prefer write in a notebook (I assume it would be digital in some form, ie a word document) and copy at a later point into your wordpress Glog. Another option would be to read an entire assignment, take some notes along the way in the book or a notebook, then sit down to reflect on the reading by writing your Glog. Experiment with the best way for you to glog. The purpose is for you to find the mediation of your reading (in effect, that is what we are doing; Birkerts would likely cringe hearing that word in connection to reading) that will best prepare you for class discussion and for your future writing. Overall, whether you write while reading or soon after, I do suggest that you never leave too much distance between your reading and your writing.

Why would Birkerts cringe? Because reading should be, as he sees it, a solitary act. The picture of reading I get thus far, particularly from the autobiographical perspective he provides in chapter 2, emphaszies what he calls his “hidden reading life” (38). Due to family dynamics that he explores, he learns to associate reading with “feminine” principles shaped by his mother and in some tension with his father. His father emphasizes the activity of doing and associates reading with passivity. I don’t want to psychoanalyze too much–though the way SB presents this, he does seem to invite this kind of analysis of psychodynamics. Is SB’s strong love of books (bibliomania) tied to feelings for his mother? I am not thinking Oedipus here so much as the way he associates reading so strongly with privacy, with the hidden, almost with an illicit activity (daydreaming in the middle of the day, inside, presumably was illicit from his father’s perspective). 

Mediation–in the form of digital reading, the screen–of this private and secluded activity thus violates not the object (the text, the book) but the subject of reading: the reading experience that Birkerts has with books. It makes the experience public; it pulls the books out of the boxes: recall his assertion that books are most alluriing when being packed up in a box (53). Digital mediation of reading and writing is lots of things; one of which is greater connection with a reading/writing audience. That is of interest to me. I wonder if others agree, are equally interested in the social aspects of digital writing (even something like Facebook). Birkerts is concerned about reading becoming too social. My concern is that his definition of reading and its significance is too narrowly viewed as private, as requiring privacy.

Thus far, Katherine Hayles presents a different view of the same picture. She, like Birkerts, is a great lover of reading and books as she grows up. The key difference is that books are examples of what she begins to define as mediation–and significantly, mediation that is not limited to books (thus, she also finds in the chemistry labratory). [We will talk more about mediation when we visit the printing press at the Lit House] For Hayles, the mediation of writing and ideas that a book represents is thoroughly material. To that extent, she is like Birkerts: she loves thinking about the material form of a book. But unlike Birkerts, she resists the “binary” (the either/or proposition) which then makes a book mutually exclusive with things in the material world, including social connections. Books, Hayles suggests to the contrary, can offer the experience of being both solitary and social. I see this in her explanation that her interest in literature and reading as with her interest in computers and how computers can mediate literature and reading–that her ‘hook’ in all this is how she can bring binaries (contraries) together.

Thus far, Birkerts and Hayles both sound similar to young Victor Frankenstein and Walton in terms of their reading histories: passionate readers. But the differences between privacy and social connection is a key; and further, how this difference comes out in Birkerts’ definition of a book as a private, almost sacred object (at least, books he considers worth reading) and Hayles’ view of a book as part of a larger “ecology” (her metaphor) of mediation in which symbolic come in a variety of material forms, including through the software and hardware of the computer you and I are using this very moment, right now.  

 

welcome, whoever you are

I look forward to meeting you in class. By the time you are looking at this, this right now, it is already days after I am writing this, this right now, and most likely I have met you, in the first class. So let me say, rather, I look forward to getting to know you.

[Whitman was really on to something, the way we do travel through our writing medium, like a voice from beyond, like a ferry that crosses over and back: check out his great poem"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" to see what I mean. It has been on my mind recently as I have worked on the course and began setting up this digital ferry. More on that later]

This site, Comp\Post, is part blog and part course web. I will use Blackboard, as you know, though mainly to collect and maintain, in virtual presence, your finished writing projects. For day to day updates and thoughts, including more from my own glogging (what’s that?), and hopefully lots of input from your own, this will be the place to go. I also have plans for you to help me build a writing resource wiki for this course and for everyone in English 101.

The point of all this? Well, as you begin to fathom from the syllabus, and perhaps from some of what I said thus far in class, this is a course that uses these various technologies as tools and media of writing, which they are (and you already know them, even if you haven’t considered them writing media). That may be unavoidable. But since we are focusing more deliberately in this course on writing (and learning to write more deliberately), and since the topic of the literature we are reading has something to do with writing and technology, with (borrowing from Katherine Hayles) writing machines, we want to do more than just not avoid the implications of writing and mediation. We want to think more specifically and robustly and imaginatively about the medium (and media) of our writing.

So, there it is. This site and other experiments with writing and remediation (a term to be explained), including your own experiments, will serve a purpose. I hope that purpose leads you, someday, you whoever you are, back here or perhaps back to your blog or to your final publication from this course and see that you have realized in your writing more than you supposed.

Reading online?

A article from a recent series in the New York Times surveys the debate about new media and literacy, “Online, R U Really Reading.” This debate was also stirred this past year by a cover article in The Atlantic Monthly, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stoopid.” [the original article is linked to a glog I posted last semester in response to it].

patchwork girl: story

Some responses from my most recent reading of Patchwork Girl.

Spending time in the “Story” section of the narrative. And that word points to the problem: this doesn’t read like a narrative; we don’t get a story to follow. Instead, we get the writing of a story (back to process, to the foregrounding of writing). And right away in this section, if we choose to see it, we get something of the wreading of a story. For example, notice the number of links from the space “birth.” Does it matter which path we take?

It does matter if the reader wants to stay within the section. Some links take me to spaces outside, such as “graveyard.” Others stay within. In other words, the links move away from what Birkerts calls “narrative thrust” and thrust us toward some sort of database: pieces that are here, but also elsewhere (where every elesewhere is also here, in computational space, as Hayles reminds us). A database of spaces that then require the reader to make some sense. Though not completely a database logic, since the links are provided by the author. We are just leave more to ourselves than we might like.

Does this sound familiar? Notice what we hear when we get to “plea” [here I return to the Story section/web, but this time aim to stay within it, and do this in using the storymap view to go space by space. The creature talking to Victor about his desire for him to create a being: so that he may become “linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded” and live in “communion” rather than in solitude. The creature has no story of his own (or in Jackson’s version, her own); communion comes only through communication (Birkerts, recall, opposes these two terms), through the workings of the database, the quilt. A story can be made; it won’t be found.

In “filthy work,” we hear again Shelley’s text echoed in Jackson’s creation; and in doing so, in linking the process of Victor into the process of this text–its hideousness–I think Shelley Jackson offers insight into the original novel: that Mary Shelley’s process of creation is also part of the story; hers, too, is a database struggling through the work of her hands toward a narrative.

“she”: the female monster speaks in a parenthetical, and illuminates the material metaphor of ‘linked to existence,” and extends the idea of the recombination at work (resemble, reassemble) to the word ‘web.’ By the way, a note on duration and slow reading. I agree with SB that these are important for critical reading and writing. I disagree, from my own experience, that such is excluded by reading in a networked environment. This section tonight is a small example. I am slowing down with this text: in part, because I have smaller spaces to work with; in part because of the lateral associations (a pejorative used by Birkerts) that Jackson makes with her words. In a word, the links move me sideways (if not thrust me forward); but the sideways move slows me down. Moving sideways, in this sense of association, can also–dare I say can better–cultivate understanding.

Isn’t this what Emerson means: all thinking is analogizing and it is the use of life to learn metonymy? Or try Jackson, from “Language, Voices”: “Everything I’m made of speaks up from the dead.” Think of the attention this gives to the langauge we read in this text; the language is the story.

A link to Jackson’s hypertext narrative (what seems to be more autobiographical) titled “The Body”

A link to Jackson’s website, Ineradicable Stain

An article on Web 2.0 storytelling; Patchwork Girl is more 1.0 (as an original hypertext, not built for the web); but it contains components that are key to what these authors call web 2.0: microcontent (chunks of information) and social collaboration. In both cases, one could argue that such storytelling resists traditional definitions of narrative. One might also argue that it takes narrative back to its oral roots.